


White Light, White Heat

by drawlight



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Historical, Alternate Universe - Medieval, Angst, Christianity, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Falling In Love, Forbidden Love, Graphic Depictions of Illness, M/M, Major Illness, Minor Character Death, Obsession, POV Severus Snape, Pining, Religious Imagery & Symbolism, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-16
Updated: 2019-01-16
Packaged: 2019-10-03 16:15:52
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 32,110
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17287328
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/drawlight/pseuds/drawlight
Summary: In 1347, Benedictine monk and scholar Severus Snape goes to fetch a young man joining the abbey. In 1347, rumors come of a strange and unrelenting plague from the east.





	1. Vigils

**Author's Note:**

> To Umberto Eco, who wrote with curiosity.
> 
> To Patti Smith's elegy to Robert Mapplethorpe,  
> which taught me that you can process your own heartwrench through words.
> 
> To my history degree, ever abandoned and left to rot.

_“And I, Agnolo di Tura, called the Fat, buried my wife and five children with my own hands.”_

 

 _“Why does tragedy exist? Because you are full of rage.  
_ _Why are you full of rage? Because you are full of grief.”_

Euripedes, Anne Carson (trans.),  
Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripedes

 

 

 

_1317_

_Cokeworth_

 

“But what about Geryon?”

He had asked the question once. Had tucked his long, dark hair behind his ears. It was probably a bit greasy, even then. The other boys would later tell him that doing that, tucking his hair back, makes him look childish. He would immediately stop; he would never do it again. Scowling, he looks up at the teacher who tells tales aloud from Aeschylus to the small flock of children. The old man frowns. (Was he old? He was probably only forty. Greyhaired and blackfrocked, he had seemed impossibly aged to eleven-year-old Severus, back in the days when everyone was divided into young and not-young. Things were simpler then.)

“Child, pay attention,” the greyed monk had said (Severus has long forgotten his name.), “Geryon is the monster of the story, not the hero. This isn’t about him.”

 _But I want to know,_ Severus had thought, _I want to know how he became a monster. Where did he come from? Why would anyone choose to be a beast? What about them?_ They had stuck in his craw, the forgotten. He doesn’t understand; it rises like bile in the back of his throat, he is infuriated. _But I want to know._

Let me tell you then about monsters; once, there was a boy.

* * *

 

 

_1347_

_Glastonbury_

 

It is late summer. It’s sitting on that very edge of the end of the hot unwelcome season, on that very tipping point into autumn. The wet, sweltering air lays sick and heavy. The winds, when they do finally come, have a strange coolness on their backs, carrying the promise of winter from their origin. Severus loathes summer, it is _hot,_ it is _sticky._ His long tunic sticks to him in all the wrong sweat-drenched ways. He peels it from his back, his shoulders. It is wet. _Men,_ he thinks wryly, _were never meant to wear wool in August._ _God, this is a worthless season._ He kicks a little at a clump of weeds, irritated and miserable in the heat.

He has always preferred winter.

Glastonbury Abbey is, like most houses of God in Britain, incredibly old. It wears the past seven hundred years in its stones, in its walls. The flagstones he walks on are smooth already. They have been worn down for hundreds of years by men with nervous habits like his own, men who had paced as they fretted. Most of those men, the old monks of the past, were now buried beneath his feet, deep under those very stones. The abbey had been founded in the 7th century and ruined once in the 12th, torn apart then by fire. (Some say the abbey is still older, still wilder. The young novice monks whisper that it had been founded instead in the time of Christ, built by the gnarled hands of Joseph of Arimathea himself. Severus glares when he overhears these rumors, his sharp dark eyes narrowed. He knows they are nothing more than idle lies.)

There are many histories in the structure. It’s comforting to know that he is one of thousands, that he will be a footnote someday in the list of brothers. Glastonbury will march on without him, borne ceaselessly into the future. He loves to lose himself in the walls. He brushes his long, inkstained fingertips against the stone. It is like stepping into the past. (Here, history lays steadily. It creeps into his breath, it gets under his fingernails. He cannot sneeze without tripping over the past.) He has been at the abbey for twenty years. It had been Albus, the old Father Abbot, who had met him in the cloisters on that first day. “ _Welcome, child_ ,” he had said then, “ _you are home now._ ” Home, long lost and long craved. It is nothing like he had ever expected. Home is not always your address. Instead, it is in the measure of calm that digs into your bones. It is not always a place. Sometimes, imagine, it is a person, a lover, a book, somewhere you have never been. Severus, born and raised far in the north, had never set his heavy bags down until he, young still and tired, had come to the abbey. Home.

Glastonbury Abbey is deep in the southwest of England in the West Country, the ancestral home of places like Cornwall and Devon. It is the home of ninety-two Benedictine monks. Severus’ brothers. Called in Latin  _Ordo Sancti Benedicti,_ they follow the black robes and crooked crozier of Saint Benedict of Nursia. Since Benedict had done that common thing of dying so many centuries prior, they are instead led in his example through the abbot. The people call them the _black monks_ with their long dark woolen habits. They are noticeable wearing their dark scapulars, the color of night, long pieces of cloth which drape over the shoulders in a constant reminder to live devotionally. He is more comfortable in the charcoal-painted uniform, despite the rough fabric, than he ever had been in anything else. (Still, he is always a little surprised to see his reflection in black wool and a scapular; he is not a holy man.) He had come here, had given himself to God, they had not asked much in return. _At some point they’re going to demand their pound of flesh, Severus._ (He waits; it has been twenty years.)

The situation of the abbey is pleasant, he’s fond of the rolling hills and surreal flatlands that give rise to strange visions. Fata morgana. It is the land that took Arthur in during his death, the land that will (as the stories go) cough the old king right back up again. Arthur and his queen, Guinevere, are buried here at Glastonbury, in little graves south of the Lady’s Chapel. Severus rather likes the strange superstitions, even if he believes in none of them. He goes often to the river Brue. It is past the abbey, around the grove of willow trees, near to the Tor. The air is heavy with humidity and peatstink when it floods, which is often. It rises thick with rainwater and snowmelt, wrapping around the old countryside. No one truly knows how the land took its name. We can look back to other histories, back to the 7th century when it was called Glestingaburg. The suffix, _burg_ , is Anglo-Saxon. It is the first part that is a mystery. Outside the abbey, not far along the canal, is the village of Glastonbury itself. It is small, with dirt paths and dusty windows. Most of the town survives on the thriving wool trade. The abbey gets some of their wool from the village. Most of it, however, they raise themselves.

His fingers pluck at the sweaty tunic. Long, dingy, soot-colored hair hangs in greasy strands about his face. It doesn’t matter how often he washes it, by the end of the day it is ever the same, always oily and slick. His bent nose dominates his features; his mouth is always pressed too thin. Age crosshatches his face, collecting in fine lines under his chin, the corners of his mouth, in the heavy bags of his eyes. He cannot even be called hideous, he knows that, because there is nothing exceptional about him. He is, quite simply, homely and unpleasant. It is infuriatingly dull. His very name, _Severus_ _Snape_ , means severe and austere. What a thing to saddle a child with. He is not sure if he was born to be pitiless or if, rather, his unfortunate name had silently steered him to it.

_What a fucking joke._

Severus has mastered the art of walking silently. It was not an accident, he has practiced for years before getting it right. He goes briskly along the corridor, stepping always from heel to ball. He lets the soles of his boots deliberately wear down so that the edges are rounded and buffed, they make no noise now on the stone floor. The hallways are always dark even in full noon, lit only by sconces and candles. They flicker against the long promise of blackness. The abbot’s office is there, at the end of the hall, beyond an odd carving of a phoenix. He knocks on the oakwood door.

“My child,” The old abbot, Albus of Falmouth, peers at him over the wire rim of his lenses. They are a curious invention, brought several years ago by visiting Dominican friars. They had been made for him especially. Careful thought had been given to the grade of the glass, the optics and refraction, by Friar Alessandro della Spina. (Severus is curious, always so curious. He has never asked the abbot if he can try the strange windows on. He knows they are a tool for the myopic, he has a touch of it himself. He wants to _know_.)  

Albus gestures at the armchair before his desk, “Please come in, sit down. Have a sweet.” Severus looks around the room with a displeased eye, perches uneasily at the edge of the upholstered red-gold chair, ready to leave at a moment. He does not reach for the confection (it is, he is quite certain, lemon-flavored).

“I will need you to go on a bit of a journey for me, Severus,” the abbot says, “Forgive me, my son, you know I’d go myself, but we both know I am growing old.” His eyes brim with mirth, “The Earl of Norfolk has a boy, a nephew. He is to be given to the monastery.”

“ _Given_? He cannot come to us himself?” Severus hates being told to fetch like a dog.

“I do not believe he comes willingly,” the abbot says. His tone mild, eyes stern.

“Ah, jailed then, for being unfortunate. A second son, perhaps? Lord save us from over-fertile women.”

“He has nowhere to go, Severus,”

“Another adopted wretch,” Severus bites, “Shouldn’t we cut down on the mongrels we take in?” (He thinks of Thomas Riddle, the sacrist, with his sly tongue and repellent breath.)

“All of them, my son?” Those eyes are ever-sharp over the top of the spectacles. Severus closes his eyes, swallows his burnt pride. He has more respect for Albus than he pretends. Most abbots live in extravagance, despite years of attempts at reform. It had been attempted with the Synods of Aachen, hundreds of years prior, they had tried to cut down on luxury at the abbot’s table, had insisted he dine in the refectory with the rest of the brethren. Overindulgence is not becoming of a monk. But, it didn’t matter. This did not, really, stop the luxury from coming with them. Albus is not like that. He is simple, even kind. (He is a manipulative old sod, good at getting his way with gentleness. Severus pictures him then, as he often does, as a chessmaster controlling the board.)

“Yes, Father.” The abbot’s long white beard scrapes the floor, picking up dirt. _You look like Merlin himself._ The old man smiles, “It’s not so bad, child. A day’s ride, perhaps.”

Severus sighs, the pinch of a headache forming in his eyes, lodged behind the optic nerve. “Yes, Father,” he says. _Yes, Father._ He will do as the abbot asks. It is all that the abbot requires. It is easy here; Severus does not ask questions. He pays his rent in the few tasks necessary of him. The sun rises in the east, as it should. It sets in the west, also as it should. The abbey is calm, placid as a pond. He marks the passage of time with the _Liturgia Horarum_. The eight calls to prayer mark the progress of the day. For all monks, it defines their very existence. (Rise, up with the dawn, get out of bed, brush the straw from your tunic. Go down the back steps, greet the sun with Lauds, that old call to prayer. At six is Prime. Terce, Sext, None, Vespers. The quiet hum of Compline, the eerie midnight of Vigils.)

He closes the oak door behind him and pauses, leans his forehead against the woodgrain. He needs to get more sleep. Always that deep exhaustion, that boneache that sleep just won’t shake. He is so tired. The world is quiet here.

 

* * *

 

When Severus leaves the abbot, he turns instead to the gardens. He passes through the cloister along the way. The cloister is the center of monastic life. In Glastonbury, it is a long rectangle. The footpaths are laid out in the shape of the cross, each unequal quadrant lined with flowering plants and a fruit tree at the center. The plants ignore him, too busy with their own cycles of living and dying to pay any attention to his cast-off glares. He sees the lady’s-mantle, the columbine, the fountain at the far end. The capitals of the pillars are decorated with scenes not found in any Bible chapter. Wild griffons, apes, naked and bestial men. Some of these appear to evoke the mythology of the untamed Celtic people who had once dominated this land. They had been driven back when Saint Patrick had come to expel the snakes. He had raised the Cross, had spread the light and the Word into these spiderwebbed shadows. Severus knows that, though their names may be forgotten, the old gods cannot be escaped. It is an uncomfortable knowledge that all Englishmen in Celtic lands must bear.

The garden is large. It is situated at the back of the abbey. Neville, one of the novices, is the lead horticulturist. He may be young (it is uncommon to entrust this to a novice) but he has an unusual knack for coaxing growth out of the hard soil, out of too-cold-winters, out of withered roots and desiccated seeds. Severus doesn’t like Neville much, he’s too clumsy, too awkward. He embarrasses Severus just with the fumbling words that fall out of his mouth. Still, the older monk appreciates the skill in the growing. He goes often in the afternoons, between the prayers of terce and sext, and names the plants for himself. There is blackberry, for gout. There’s angelica, to protect against illness and witchcraft. (Some keep it on a chain, tucked against their hearts, to keep witches at bay. Severus is a cynic, he doubts in magic. He doubts, in fact, in everything.) Burdock is kept for the lepers and hyssop for coughs. Hildegard of Bingen, that old saint, that old abbess, had recommended to steep it deeply, to brew it into a tea.

There is not always much difference between medicine and witchcraft. In Glastonbury, the home of Arthur, the study of witchcraft is as essential as breathing. They, as warriors of Heaven, study the defenses against witchcraft. How do you identify a witch? Uncast the spell? Destroy the beast? ( _Take some gardenias now, here they are, for luck.)_ Since coming south, Severus has learned that magic is both less here and it is more. It is less edited, it is untamed. It has reached fewer great heights of the witches up on the moors; but in Arthur’s lands, it is capable of so much more. He understands, on rare quiet and indulgent nights, why the southerners are afraid of witches and their black magic. There is something dangerous and obscene about it down in these wild lands.

Severus _knows_ that witchcraft is evil, it is the Devil’s work. He knows a thing or two about it, though he has never practiced. He is the resident expert on the defense against witchcraft, he collects pamphlets and treatises on sorcery and hedge magic. It is key to know how to root out the infection at the source. He knows how quickly a witch should burn. That if you drop a woman in the lake and she sinks, she is innocent. The forest should be watched for strange signs, for toads and for black cats. Look up, further up, with suspicious eyes for clutches of owls in the sky.

He knows the other monks, the younger ones, find his obsession strange. _Greasy old bat_ , they say (he is no favorite among the brothers). He knows that they spread rumors, often meant for him to overhear, whispering among themselves that he himself is a witch, that he is _cruel_ and _slimy_ and there is certainly _no doubt_ that he secretly performs demonic blood rituals. It doesn’t matter, he is fascinated by the stories and the folios depicting the grotesque. He has seen the pamphlets of Baphomet, the Templar heresy. He’s read deeply of how to hunt and identify witches. On late evenings in the scriptorium, he copies them out in his careful spidery hand. The margins carefully packed with painted images of the wretched long-nosed women and their foul demonic companions. Worse still, he is always tempted. What if, he thinks, what if he were to burn patchouli for luck. Would it change anything? He wonders, ever enthralled, about the darkness of witchcraft. How easy it might be to reach out to the Devil, invite him in for dinner. (Curiosity, as always, is his downfall.)

He thinks of his mother too, who had kept her little charms. The wax carving he had kept in his trouser pocket, ages eight to sixteen, the almadel, red and inscribed with the names of the saints. The salt she poured in doorways, the burnt sage, the coin under his pillow and rosemary in his shoe. He knows that the other monks fear witchcraft, they do not understand it. Like a good Benedictine, Severus commits himself to the eradication of witches. Still, there is a small part of him that remembers his mother, her proud face, her dark eyes like the wide expanse of night, who never said _I love you_ in words. She had said it instead with her charms, which she put under his pillow or touched to his forehead. She had said it with a blessing in her old Slavonic tongue, which she had never taught him. He regrets never having learnt. She had loved him, she had to have, he is certain. (He hopes.)

 

* * *

 

Most of the monks hate Vigils the most. It is the mid-night prayer. The bells peal at two o’clock in the morning. The sky is dark. Dawn is still far away. He grunts, one hand rubbing the bridge of his nose, trying to force the sleep from his eyes. For Vigils, you go down the back steps by candlelight. This prayer is always quiet. It drones. Most of them doze off at one point during the service, their heads bobbing like a seagull on water. Some of the wiser ones suck on peppercorns to stay awake.

He looks up to the crucifix in the apse. It is Romanesque, twelfth-century, made of white oak and gilded, with Christ’s arms wide and eyes open, ever triumphant over death. _Believe in Him, Severus, and you will be released._ Goddammit, the very act of living is so _frustrating._ He knows he is made in God’s image; he wonders how God could be so cruel to fill him up with all this _curiosity_ and nowhere to look.

 

* * *

 

 

He had struck out from Glastonbury Abbey in the morning. The cook had tucked a bit of bread and water into his bag. He had frowned upon seeing it. It is more than he needs for the day’s journey; Severus Snape has never taken much comfort in eating. It is a simple ride, not far, about a day on horseback.

As he draws near to Norfolk, to Privet Hall, he crosses a small river. He looks at the water. What the water wants is hurricanes and land to run into and back. He stares at his unfortunate reflection, pale as a dead fish, eyes like empty houses. His face stares back from the water. _God, you’re ugly._ His reflection is shame. It is a measure of his own hate, how he can loathe his own face. His nose (broken, twice) hooked like a pharaoh’s crook in his sarcophagus. His skin, which is pale and horrible and sallow. No one’s skin should be the color of old, dusty paper, of the undersides of snakes, of dead fish, stinking in an alley. His eyes are dull and dark. Black is the plainest of colors (the Benedictines had all agreed, had chosen it for their modest robes). His eyes are nothing remarkable. No one would celebrate them; shadows are all too common.

He looks, he knows, like his mother, who was not English. His mother, born deep in the Carpathian mountains, at the gate to another world. Who had met God through another church in the east. It doesn’t matter that he was born to Cokeworth, to a foul English town and a still fouler English father. The other monks call him _The Wallachian,_ they can smell the distant Slavic blood from afar. He will never be one of them. _It doesn’t matter._ Cut it out then and restart.

The journey is uneventful and dull. He glares at trees and clouds for lack of anything better to do. Privet Hall is in Norwich, deep in Norfolk in East Anglia. It is thrown out on the other side of the island kingdom, where the North Sea forms the shoreline. It has a long history of resentment and rebellion. The Iceni are from here, who had revolted against the Romans in the year 47, led by their warrior-queen Boadicea. Yet, she had died a hero, her memory carved into statues to be looked at by the ones left. The Romans had built ports and roads, had built up agriculture. This is where the Angles and Saxons would later land, invading in their wooden longships from Scandinavia across the sea.  They would entrench themselves and eventually the original inhabitants, the queer Iceni and Brythonic creatures, would be lost to time. By the time the Normans would cross their shores later still, in 1066, the Anglo-Saxons would be seen as the original and rightful inhabitants, never mind that they’d taken it also, so many years before.

The Hall is in the Fenlands, a low coastal plain right on the shore. It is marshy and stormy. The alkaline water gets in everything, miserable with dead things decomposing, returning to dirt and soil, ready to start again. There are many monasteries here that Severus has never had a chance to visit. Crowland and Ely, Peterborough and Thorney. A satisfied smirk crosses his face slightly at the thought of them. They are no Glastonbury, which is paramount. Glastonbury, which may have been built by Joseph of Arimathea, which may have been visited by Christ himself. Glastonbury, where Arthur is buried and will rise again. Glastonbury is special, second only in glory to Canterbury Cathedral, from whence the archbishop rules his flock.

At nine o’clock, as nightfall comes, he draws near to Anglia. A banner rises from the battlement bearing the image of three golden crowns. He draws a breath, steeling himself as he looks over the rise of the keep. It juts out severely from the flat land. Built two hundred years prior by Anglo-Norman nobility, Privet Hall is more of a fortification than anywhere comfortable to pass one’s time. It is of Romanesque design, thick with pilaster buttresses. The town sits in front of the Hall, beyond lay the five hectares devoted to hunting. It is one of the largest hunting grounds in Britain, including a deer park and rabbit warrens which long windows look out over. There is a Norman chapel there, built from local sandstone and from scavenged Roman tiles.

Cross the bridge and pass the gatehouse. Up the long stairway of the forebuilding. He enters through the door, wide and thick walls of brown carrstone rise up above him, reinforced with timbers crossing the ceiling.

“Who is it?” a guard calls.

“Severus Snape, from the Abbot of Glastonbury. I am expected by Lord Dursley.”

“Well, come on then.” He goes then to the depths of Privet Hall. It is late. (He is hot and sweat drips down his chest from neck to navel. He is aching, bonetired.)

 


	2. Lauds

_“Jesus died for somebody’s sins but not mine.”_

Patti Smith, Gloria 

 _“No matter how I try to evoke the starry lad he was,  
_ _it remains a plain, odd history. So I began to think about history.”_

Anne Carson, Nox

 

“There is talk of disease in the east,” Vernon Dursley, the ruddy-cheeked Earl of Norfolk, says. Yes, Severus has heard the rumors. The talk had started quietly. It trickles in with the ships, with the sailors. They are safe there on the island kingdom, there is no way for it to cross the Channel, to jump from recently-possessed Calais to London. No, the pestilence would not come to England, he is sure of it. It is only a ghost story.

“ _If_ it is more than a rumor, I doubt it will breach our shores,” Severus says, picking at his plate. There is meat there, a bit of bread. He feels strange with the wealth of options before him, laid out on the groaning long table. Petunia, Lady Dursley, pinch-faced and simpering, jostles him and reaches for his cup, pouring him more wine. It is a good one, dry and tannic. He is discomfited; he has never been good at accepting hospitality. He plucks at his dark habit, fluffing the collar at his neck, pulling at his hair. As if fussing with his outfit might remind them of his role as a monk, that he is no one to trifle with. He is a representative of the Abbot of Glastonbury. He is of _consequence_ . (He is, always, _always_ deep within, a scrawny, greasy urchin from Cokeworth with nothing to eat.)

“A lot already died at Crécy.” Vernon grumbles, he refills his glass with wine, “disease will only make it worse.” Severus watches the portly man with distaste. He thinks back to last summer’s shattering victory over the French. It had been a matter of national pride. The English king, Edward, in a hail of glory. His archers had been the ball in the corner pocket with their yew-hewn longbows, raining death down upon Philip’s men. King Edward, third of his name, who has sat on his throne for twenty years. He had risen in war, in blood, against his French mother, Isabella, and her wretched lover, that foul Mortimer fellow. The king had deposed Mortimer, had taken his rightful place, had claimed the throne and reached out across the sea with fingers toward the French throne. England has been at war for ten years; it feels rather like it will never end. He is tired of war.

Vernon’s table at Privet Hall intimidates him slightly. He thinks of his childhood. He has never been wealthy, he does not come from noble stock. His blood is common. He had never tasted game until much later, on evenings like this, journeying on the abbot’s behalf. In the north, he had lived on rye bread, on barley porridge, fava beans (which he had always loathed). Cod and herring were often found on his father’s table. Never fresh, his tongue is always sick with the salt of them. But _here,_ here is laid a feast for the senses. He smells the peculiar scents of spices from farther than he has ever dreamt, pulled from Xanadu, from the Silk Road. Here there is black pepper, yellow saffron, orange dried and pulverized ginger. They do not hoard sugar the way his mother had, it is easy for Vernon to acquire. Loathing sticks on the back of his tongue. He finds he hates them more suddenly, hates the way they flaunt their wealth, their comfort. (They have never eaten leather shoes.)

Severus is good at hate.

“Boy!” Vernon calls, his face red and fat. His beard burnishes in the candlelight. A youth looks up from a distant table. He blinks a little. Severus feels a jolt of something go through him as the boy’s eyes (like hawthorn, like seaweed) connect with his own. It feels like discontent (he hates being surprised). “Come here, Potter,” Vernon says, jabbing at their table with mutton on a knife. Potter blinks. Silently, he gathers his drink, walks over. Severus watches with a mild fascination as a quiet mask slips over the boy’s features, schooling them into a studied apathy.

The boy (what is he anyway, perhaps twenty?) is striking. It is a shame to sequester him from the world (it is a glory to give him to God). His dark eyes feast on long, unbroken pale skin and hair dark as a tomb. There is a callousness to the way the boy walks, almost indecently, as if he is owed the world. Severus immediately dislikes him; he has no patience for inconvenient sons foisted off onto him who do not know their place. The boy’s long throat unnerves him, his own runs dry. He thinks suddenly of the novices who share bunks, he knows the stories. It is not spoken of, he has never done it, he has never been offered. Who would ever offer to _him_ ? (His own ugliness is a comfort, he will never be risked. _Lead me not into temptation_.) Potter’s face, though, is a curiosity. It is marked, wounded, by a peculiarly-shaped lightning bolt scar. He wonders where the boy got it. (Later, he notices the purpled calluses on Vernon’s hands, his knuckles. He sees the way the young man flinches when his uncle gesticulates, hands flying quickly to and fro. He doesn’t need to spare much of a guess about the scar.)

“My wife’s sister’s bastard kid,” Vernon laughs, “Ain’t good for a damn thing. Hell if I’m not glad you’re taking him off my hands. He’s a goddamn troublemaker, that one.” He leans in tight, “Watch him close, eh?” Severus is quiet, his black eyes absorb the young man. Potter stands quietly, easily. Severus can only barely discern the slight tension in his body that is years of anger, years of fear, years of hatred sewn into his skin. _What do you want, Potter? To go anywhere but here? Do you really think godforsaken Glastonbury is the place to do it?_

God, if the very _idea_ of Potter as a postulant isn’t laughable. Severus grits his teeth. He’s done it himself, he knows the drill. Potter will not do, he is too proud. Start as a postulant, declare your intent. Live among the monastery for six months. Go through the motions, eat the gruel, say your prayers. At the end of it, if you choose (Severus had said _yes_ , of course, where else would he have gone?), then take the old black habit. Slip it on, over your head, over your shoulders. It is heavy with meaning, woven with the weight of God. If you cannot carry Heaven then take it off. If you _can_ , however, then you now become a novice. Under probation. Do your year, the novitiate. Take your vows. Join us. (He cannot see Potter as a postulant, a novice, a monk. Potter’s eyes are too big and too round. They swallow up the world with curiosity.)

“Can you read Latin, boy?” Severus asks. Potter rolls his eyes. He watches as the frustration suffuses into his expression.

“Of course I can,” the younger man glares. He flushes when he’s angry, it is unfortunately _incredibly_ arresting. (Look away, Severus. There is nothing for you here.) He is fascinated. A wretched part of him wants to irritate Potter again, just to watch that blush climb his skin once more. (It is like coming up for air; it is like sitting down at a feast.)

When Severus turns back, he sees that Vernon has already lost interest in the both of them and is focused on persuading a few guests to join a boar hunt. Potter watches him, a smirk on the slightly thin lips, as if to say _I told you so._

“Is it strange?” Potter asks.  
  
“Is _what_ strange?” He bites, fangs in his mouth.

Potter gestures with an outstretched hand to the world around them. Trees, oxygen, wildflowers, dung.  “Becoming a monk. Living in the monastery.” (Leaving the world.)

“I don’t remember,” he says, pushing the meat around on his plate. It is not entirely the truth. He imagines that the younger man is thinking of women, of soft skin and hair, small bones and small feet. To be brought to kneel in the abbey is to relinquish worldly pleasures. He is not sure how he can ask that from a man that age, barely twenty-one. _Have you ever been touched? Do you have any idea what they are asking of you?_

“What do you do?”

“What do you mean?”

“In the abbey,” Potter says, “What kind of work?”

“I glorify God,” he says (it is the usual dull answer), “I am the librarian. I care for the library, the scriptorium, I manage the works we produce. I work with illumination.”

“I’ve heard them talk, the priests in the village,” Potter frowns, “Isn’t it a bit conceited to think that we can glorify God with our own human work?”

Severus looks at him with reproach, “Hush, boy. That smacks of the Eastern heresy. If we are given such gifts, isn’t it hubris to not?”

“Where are you from?” the young man asks.

“Cokeworth.”

“Where is that?”

“North,” he says, rough-voiced, “in Yorkshire, near to the Scots.”

“Is it cold there?” Potter asks.

“Yes.”

“Oh,” the boy says. Severus can see the south in him, the way his skin glows like Midas in the sun. He has the blood of the southern Celts in him. Blackhaired, like the Irish on their own miserable isle. It feels alien to Severus, he does not like it.

“You’re piss drunk,” the boy laughs. Severus feels the mottled wine-blush rising through his throat, up in his cheeks. He has never had a head for alcohol. Things seem strangely clear and unclear. It is absolutely certain that Harry Potter is beautiful, cast in the mold of the gods (it is less clear of why he shouldn’t think so).

 

* * *

 

They leave in the morning. He hopes Potter isn’t a talkative creature; Severus has never liked idle conversation.

“Is it dangerous?” Potter asks as they tie the bags to the horses.

“What?”

“Traveling,” Potter says, quietly, his eyes cast anywhere but at Severus, “I’ve never been brought anywhere.” _Of course you haven’t_ . Of course the boy would have been left to rot at Privet Hall. _Make no noise, pretend you don’t exist._ Lonely children are good at finding dark corners to hide in, at making friends with rats and dust and shadows. You can make a toy out of anything. Your hands, a piece of lint, dry straw. Severus is uncomfortably reminded of a town far to the north called Cokeworth, sat deep in Yorkshire. Of another boy, night-haired and worry-eyed, who had also found friends in spiders.

“If you are not careful,” he says. There aren’t many things Severus is good at but he can hold his own in a fight. (You cannot be _queer,_ be _deviant,_ be _bent_ and be from Cokeworth without getting good in a brawl.)

His queerness had come as a horrible revelation. Twelve-years-old, gangly, with long-arms and long-legs that did not yet fit his frame. Over-large hands that never would. He doesn’t remember the name of the baker’s son, fifteen-years-old and blond-haired, that had caught his eye. Instead, he remembers the obsession, the need to be near, the way he collected every word the boy spoke. How seeing the boy grin was like swallowing the sun. The lousy, sick shame. _No, Lord, why me?_ He’d already been saddled with a brutish father who had one hell of an uppercut. Now this. Embarrassment and humiliation had soaked through his skin like a sponge. He had radiated his own disgust. _What about the monsters,_ he had wondered once (not too long ago), _who would choose to be a beast?_ (He knows now that one does not always get to choose. If the world comes at you swinging, why not bite back?)

They travel for miles in comfortable silence. Severus is grateful. It is a long time before Potter speaks again. He looks at Severus, frowning. “When we get to the abbey,” he says, the suntanned hands uncommonly tight on the reins, “what will _I_ do there?”

“You can do anything you wish, Potter, if you aren’t _as_ much of an idiot as the lot of them.”

“Even illumination? I’ve never seen anything like that, you know. My uncle doesn’t like books.”

Severus grimaces and thinks of Lord Vernon Dursley. The idiotic brute had probably never _opened_ a book, let alone thought about purchasing one. He wonders where Potter had scraped his education together enough from to learn Latin. “What a surprise.”

He is uncomfortably reminded of the boy. Potter is more beautiful in the morning sunlight than in the candlelight of the night before. _What would you look like, just like this, waking up to the dawn?_  He breathes in harshly. _Stop it, you vile bastard. Breathe. Cast it out. You took a vow._

The life of a monk can be boiled down to three basic vows. You take the Vow of Obedience. Empty your pockets of lint and coins and swear to the Vow of Poverty. Then turn around and keep your eyes shut and your breeches done up tight, and swallow down the Vow of Chastity. They do not ask much in the monastery save complete compliance. It’s never been difficult for Severus in the past. Say your prayers, eat your gruel. If asked, fetch miserable boys from across the earth. It isn’t hard. It’s never been hard. He frowns. In his wretched sinner’s life, he grows old.

As they draw near to Glastonbury, Severus holds his breath for a moment as the old abbey comes into view. He likes the way newcomers gasp quietly when they watch the old stones rise out of the oak and hawthorn trees. He likes it especially today, when the sky is grey and the mists cling like a cloak to their skin. _The world seems stranger here._ This odd otherworldly south.

The abbot greets them in the cloister, where the sections of the cross intersect. His eyes the color of the high-noon sky, of the cloak of Mary, Mother of God. Severus is uncomfortably reminded of another day, twenty years ago, where a similarly lost creature with dark hair and somber eyes had walked into Albus’ outstretched hands. “Welcome, my son,” the timeworn man greets Potter, eyes mischievous, his hands rumpled, “I do not know what Severus has told you but I assure you that we are not so bad as the Egyptians who, as Cassian says, make their young men water dry sticks for months.”

“Thank you, Father,” Potter says. Severus can see the sudden ferocity of the boy as he tumbles into Albus’ embrace. He knows how it feels to suddenly step into the light of kindness. Albus has spirited Potter away from so much, away from dark rooms with only spiders for company. Severus knows that there will never be a moment now without Albus in the boy’s heart. Potter is the abbot’s man, he always will be. (Severus knows what it looks like, he is the same.)

“You are home now, my boy,” Albus says. (Severus closes his eyes at the all-too-familiar words.) Home. Back again, just in time for the evening prayer. Potter stops in front of Severus before they leave, hesitant and pawing at his satchel.

“Er, thank you then,” the boy says, picking idly at a hangnail. “For bringing me.”

“It was my duty, Potter. Not a kindness. _Don’t_ confuse the two.”

“Right,” Potter says, “of course.” Severus grits his teeth, he wants to pull the boy’s hands away from that hangnail. _Stop it._ “Will I see you around?”

“You will surely need to be trained in the library and art of copying. I imagine the unfortunate task will fall to me,” he might crack a molar if this goes on. _Breathe._ Pleasure spreads across the boy’s face. The tight shoulders relax a bit.

“Alright then,” he says, hoisting his satchel. “See you around, Snape.”

* * *

 

He doesn’t like to come down here, below the soil. This horrible ossuary which opens into a labyrinth of catacombs. Every old monk comes here eventually, so he comes (they all do) to meditate on death. Like every proper monk, Severus puts on a face of bland acceptance. He is a man of _God_ , he is _wise_ , he does not _fear._ Inside though, inside he is quietly screaming, desperate to pull away from the bones. _No, no, I want to live._ He doesn’t like to touch the bones, the skulls, set into walls, fearful as though death will pass on through to him by osmosis.

Ash to ash. Dust to dust. Render unto God what is His ( _we are all God’s playthings_ , he thinks).  He does not speak these things aloud, these miserable betrayals to himself, to the abbot, the Pope in Avignon, to God himself. No, he says nothing. The abbey has been kind to him. He is envious of the believers. His cynicism knows no bounds. It unfurls from him like a stench, like a miasma, as pungent and sickly as the scourge. (He would like to believe, to walk into God’s love. He has never been told he is loved.)

“You wanted me?” he says to the man in the center of the room. Thomas Riddle, darkhaired and London-voiced, is carefully inspecting the banners and altarpieces in the room, no doubt putting prices on them. Severus feels his skin crawl when the other man gets up, looks up, dusts off his knees. There is something unpleasant about the sacrist that he just cannot quite untangle.

“Severus,” Thomas says, smiling a liar’s smile. “I wanted to talk to you about the abbot.”

“Oh?” he raises one smoke-colored brow. Skeptical at best. “What about him?”

  
“He’s getting old, as we all know. We need to begin to … consider a replacement. Your opinion is valued here, I’d like to be in agreement.” _Ah._

“Color me _utterly_ shocked, Thomas,” he says, crossing his arms. “And I suppose you’d like yourself to be considered.”

"I would not be disappointed to serve the Lord in such a way."

"I'd rather eat roaches, Thomas."

“Careful where you step, Severus. You don’t want to make me your enemy.” Severus narrows his bleak eyes. He is sick to death of superstition. He doesn’t trouble himself with falsehoods of his own goodness. He is a sinner. God is gone. It was, in the end, very simple.

The abbey is always cold, even in the height of summer. It gets into the skin, his bones, between his teeth. (He hates the cold.) Not many fires are lit beyond the kitchen, the infirmary, the abbot’s quarters. The dormitories are located in the eastern range, on the second floor. He finds his room, his cell. It is simple enough, which suits him. He is a creature of habit; he has made few changes in the past twenty years. The bed is a pallet of well-arranged straw. It is surprisingly warm, the straw efficient at trapping body heat in the spaces between.

He has never slept well. He tosses in fits, turning, the straw falling out and spilling over the cold stone floor. Sleep is never dreamless. The good nights are the ones he does not remember. Usually, however, he remembers everything. The crunch of a fist against the zygomatic bone, his father’s mocking laugh, the other children in Cokeworth and their wretched voices always calling him _weird,_ calling him _greasy_ . They pick up their toys, their balls and bats, say _get out of here, Snivellus, there’s no room for you._

_Go to sleep now, Severus. Try again tomorrow._

* * *

 

 

Lauds is always about the Resurrection. They greet the renewal of the sun with the miracle of Christ. After, there is a quiet drone as each monk spends the next hour in prayer and reflection, reading softly aloud from their Book of Hours, each continuing prayers of meditation for the day.

 _And on the third day, he rose again._ Christ, who had been taken down gently from the cross by soldiers, delivered into the hands of Joseph of Arimathea, who had pulled the old nails out of the palms of his hands. Had pulled hard where they caught at the bone. The old saint had gotten blood on his clothing, smelling like iron. He smelled like the firing of a gun, an invention hundreds of years later (once we’d gotten a bit more efficient at killing each other). It had taken six hours for Christ to die on the cross. He’d been put up there at the time of Lauds, around nine o’clock, while the sun is bright. The crucifix hangs large over the nave, dominating the room, an uncomfortable reminder of why he was here.

 

* * *

 

Glastonbury Abbey, like all monasteries of its size, is entirely self-sufficient. Some hew grain, some bake bread, some cut hair. Severus writes. Mostly, he illuminates.

The library is adjacent to the scriptorium. He is in reverence here, in this place for knowledge. When he is at odd ends, Severus always finds himself here. He reaches for his ink set, his hands spread reverently over blank parchment. He dips his quill feather into the ink (dark as the night). The iron-gall ink is a chemical reaction. (Severus is a scholar; all things are chemical reactions.) It is made from gallnuts, imported from Aleppo. The larvae of the thing had long left the nest of the nuts, had bored out into the world, and left this curious ball of tannins and gallic acid. The novices take the nuts, crush them with mortar and pestle. Mix with rain. This is the first ingredient of iron-gall ink. The second is ferrous sulphate, commonly found in the nearby river. Called copperas, called green vitriol. Add to the mixture, stir with a fig stick. The reaction occurs slowly, gently settling from dead leaf brown into the heavy stygian blackness of ink.

Severus is given most of the illumination work; he has always had steady hands. The life of a scribe is not one of comfort. The scriptorium is cold and drafty from the tall windows. Despite this, he keeps close to the windows to be near the light. He always works better in natural light. He sits at the desk, drawing the letters, dipping the pen, for six or eight hours each day. There is no relief. His hands cramp. He massages them a little, holding them over the heat of his candle.

Illumination is how he gives glory to God. He does not have much to give, only steady hands with exceptional fine motor skills, good for detail work. He starts with a blank piece of white parchment and sketches the underdrawing in graphite. Once the design is complete, he reaches for the bottle of liquid size, an animal glue solution suspended in water. He washes the entire page with the size, preparing it for gold and paint. All illuminations are polished with gold or silver. Gold leaf is always done before color, before pigment. He cuts it to the exact specifications with a knife, applies it to the parchment, finishes with a burnishing tool. Then, a basic wash of color. He mixes the pigments with gum arabic, which has recently replaced glair as the preferred mixing medium. He works with a finely pointed brush, scarce bigger than a housecat’s claw. He tips it with his mouth, dipping the bristles between his lips, wetting them with his own tongue and spit. Then come the shadows and light, giving final space and form to the illustration. Glory unto Him, God in Heaven. God be praised.

It is a sacred task. He gets up each day, wipes the sleep from his eyes, shepherds the knowledge through the years. The books are precious. His favorites are the Greeks, the Romans. He loves the little folio of Marcus Aurelius’ _Meditations_. ( _“Dwell,”_ Marcus Aurelius, that old philosopher-king, had written, _“on the beauty of life. Watch the stars, and see yourself running with them.”_ ) He fights against fire, against damp and mold. The library was already long-damaged when he had first come to the abbey. It is large and beautiful, rife with unique folios and copies of crumbling ancient histories of England, of afar, of their forebears, the early Christians. Yet, it had been damaged in the fire in 1184. Severus had made it his life’s work to repair that wound as best he could. He sets the monks to copying furiously from loaned titles, acquiring like a dragon on his hoard. He sets words into the library like jewels in a crown.

He stares at his cramping, lined hands, full of hate.

 

* * *

 

 

Yes, Potter is quieter than he’d expected. It is not a quiet that settles him. Few notice when the youth takes the extra pieces of bread from the table, slips them into his long sleeves. It’s not something to take note of unless you’ve done it, unless you’ve felt the queer burn of hunger and been unable to find another crumb to lick. It had taken him decades to stop (he still does it, sometimes, on his bad days). Severus drinks him in, he catalogues his knowledge of the boy. He knows Potter prefers his ale made with a hop-heavy recipe, he jumps at a chance for any food that is not mushy, stewed grains. The Benedictines are forbidden to consume the flesh of four-legged animals. Saint Benedict had thought this was too much, that it led to indulgence. So it is usually fish or chicken. Sometimes a goose if it can be caught by an unlucky postulant. On feast days, when the rules are relaxed, he takes his pittance in the form of wine. He laughs a lot when he drinks wine, Severus has noticed. His face flushes, up starting from below the collar, below where Severus can see. ( _Where does that start? I want to see the beginning, I want to trace it with my fingers, cool it with my tongue._ )


	3. Prime

 

_“The sailors brought in their bones a disease so violent that whoever spoke a word to them was infected and could in no way save himself from death... Those to whom the disease was transmitted by infection of the breath were stricken with pains all over the body and felt a terrible lassitude. There then appeared, on a thigh or an arm, a pustule like a lentil. From this the infection penetrated the body and violent bloody vomiting began. It lasted for a period of three days and there was no way of preventing its ending in death.”_

Michele di Piazze, letter. October 1347.

 

 _“Her am I floating 'round my tin can_  
_far above the moon_  
 _planet earth is blue_  
 _and there's nothing I can do."_

David Bowie, Space Oddity

 

“Come with me,” Severus says. Potter looks at him, blinking. He sets the brush down. He has been a quieter creature than Severus had expected. Albus had come to him with white brows furrowed, “I worry about Harry, Severus, take him to the Tor, spend a few hours together. It would be good for him to not be alone.”

“Me?” Severus had asked. There was never any point in arguing with the abbot. So here he is, in front of Potter, waiting impatiently.

“Where?” Potter asks.

“Do as I say, Potter.”

“Yes, sir,” Potter gathers his things. They wander out here, past the cloisters. “This is the garden, it stretches back, back there to the forest.” They venture on a half-mile until the trees clear.

“What is this?” Potter breathes.

“The Tor,” he looks out over the tall hill, dominating the countryside. The abbey is secluded in forest, it is difficult to see much beyond the stones and the trees. Once you walk out of the groves, the tor dominates all. “The Welsh call it _Ynys Wydryn_. Isle of Glass. The superstitious call it something else.” He pauses, breathing in the scent of heather and grass, “ _Avalon_.” He looks at the boy, “I came here a lot,” Severus grits out, “when I first arrived.” Potter’s face is rapturous, greedily drinking in the landscape with his wide eyes.

“Is it real then? Avalon? The stories?” Potter is soft, reverent.

“I don’t know.” On another day, twenty years ago, Albus had taken him to the top of the tor. The abbot’s beard had been ruddier then, shot through with copper. His eyes, as always, were blue. (Severus thinks of the blue ink in the scriptorium that sits in his wells. Blue is the second most common color he works with, after red. It is taken from the blue stone azurite. To make ink, the hard stone must be smashed. It must be ground patiently with mortar and pestle until after a long fight it dissolves into powder. There are other blues, more precious blues, that come from further afield. Ultramarine comes from across the sea, from ground lapis lazuli, prized from Afghan sand. Ultramarine might have been more precious but the abbot’s eyes were sky-colored, they would always remind Severus of azurite.)

Albus had reached out to him, said, “Sometimes, my child, it is good to have a place to think.” He had looked out over Somerset from the peak. “This is a good place for that, I’ll share it with you.” Severus can see the river Brue which wraps like a serpent around the Summerland Meadows. In the old days of Arthur, the meadows would flood, would turn the hill into an island. The Tor is a mystery, no one knows who created it, when, nor why. Perhaps it was agriculture or natural erosion. Perhaps defensive ramparts (it would be easy enough here, to pick off enemies as an archer). Perhaps it is old and sacred, consecrated to gods he cannot name.

There are some places on Earth where the veil between the sacred and the profane narrows. He knows this, it runs in his blood. His birth is as vulgar and dull as Cokeworth ever is. No one looks to the sky in Cokeworth, not his father, that wool-shearer, soaked in ale and squalor. He thinks of his pitch-eyed mother, who had liked to tell him stories to brighten that cheerless place. He has never been to Wallachia, to Snagov, where the lake curls like a dragon. From her tongue, he knows that the lake is pure and cold and deep, that a white monastery rises triumphant from the isle in the center. His pride comes through his mother’s blood, given there at the beginning like a mother’s immunity being passed on. The Wallachians are always proud, their faces always turned to the sun. They had refused to pay tribute to the Hungarian king, had come together under Radu Negru, _Radu the Black_ , who was named in the Slavic tongue for joy, who had collected his people sixty years ago, a lifetime ago, and ruled as the first voivode. His mother had been young, still beautiful (he had seen it in the ruin of her face). He had been young when the famine came. He does not remember her much, all this time later.

Potter stands in the sunlight. Severus can see a faint dusky mark on his neck of a healing bruise, it had been difficult to discern previously in shadow.

“They struck you?” he asks. It is easy enough to imagine, to paste Potter’s face over his own. It is easy enough to remember. (His father holding out the back of his hand like a promise, ready to strike. Severus is felled, fallen, onto the stones of the street. He likes to hit in public, everyone watches. _Look at you, you fucking freak. You broke my fucking finger._ ) His fingers twitch slightly, aching to hit back, all this time later.

“Sometimes,” Potter looks off, his eyes blank and far away, “mostly they forgot about me.”

“What happened to your parents?”

“Dead now,” the boy says. (He picks a little at his tunic. Severus swallows down an admonition. _Stop it._ )

“I see.”

“It’s alright,” Potter says, “I never knew them.” Severus nods (he remembers his own, he wishes he did not). They sit in the grass and share the ends of the hardcrusted bread. (Severus has always marveled at bread, that chemical reaction that provides. Take four disparate ingredients, none that provide nourishment, none you can live on. Flour, water, salt, yeast. Mash them together, stick them in the fire. Out of that, reach your hand into the pit and receive this, this glorious gift from the heavens. There is no greater kindness than sharing bread. No greater smell than bread, right out of the firepit, freshly baked.)

He studies the young man opposite him. The proud face, straightnosed and strong-chinned. The boy could etch glass with his jaw, just barely now dusted with the growth of a dark beard. Severus thinks of the Greeks, of their youths, always athletic and beautiful in exactly the way this one is. He shifts a little, discomfited. He doesn’t like the night-colored hair, the eyes like murky seawater. The thin lips with their Cupid’s bow, the widow’s peak that crowns his face (like a prince, you cannot lock this boy away). _His only crime was to be born to nothing._

He looks away (do not think about it).

“They weren’t married,” the boy says quietly. “I guess that’s why my uncle hates me so much. I’m shameful, you know? My father was only a sailor.”

Severus watches and says nothing. “I heard my father was a good man,” Potter says. “The abbot knew him, I guess. He said I look like him. But that I have my mother’s eyes.” Severus knows how it feels to wear his parents’ faces. He knows how it feels to inherit nothing from your father beyond a blazing anger. (He wants to hurt things. But all things are God’s creatures, great and small. So he does not touch them; instead, he picks blades of grass, wildflowers, he tears them apart with his hands. _God, you’re pathetic._ He is a miserable creature.)

He also wears his mother’s eyes. He remembers her small hands. (Taken from him by the famine in the year of our Lord 1315. He had been eight years old and scared. He remembers the taste of boiled leather; he remembers going barefoot.) He had not seen much kindness after. (He’d had a cousin once who had been kind. She’d had green eyes and a gentle voice. He has not seen her in thirty years.)

Potter’s face is turned into the sun.

He can see so much brightness in Potter. It is overwhelming, he wants to shield his eyes from the sun. It looks like it should burst out from his eyes, his mouth, his fingernails. When he smiles, the sun looks out. The world is gentle here, where Potter is. Severus does not understand. _What is it like to walk in the light_ (He has always shouldered the shadows.) It is harder to find brightness in the north. Not like these odd Brythonic lands, with their odd sons.

Potter turns to face him, his lips part. He licks them, ready to speak. Severus will never know what the boy was about to say. He surges in as a wave, slotting Potter’s mouth into his own. He had always thought it would be strange, mouth upon mouth, but it is _heat_ and _slick_ and he moans into the other man’s mouth, who swallows it down. Potter’s compact hands grip at him, leaving a trail of bruised fingerprints in their wake. (Later, when Severus peels off his tunic, they will mark him like a map of the places Potter has visited. _This,_ the marks will say, _this is where he has been._ ) His hands wrench up from Potter’s shoulders, cup the heart-shaped face, pawing at the flesh like clay, up into Potter’s spiderweb hair. Potter keens into his mouth, _yes yes yes Severus yes,_ and he is suddenly, dreadfully aware of the heaviness between his legs, hard as stone. Potter is pressing into his thigh, the tensed muscle, slightly rocking and whispering promises.

He breaks away, one hand to Potter’s chest. The boy is gulping oxygen, his eyes like planets. His hands still cling to Severus’ tunic, tangled in the folds, holding to him like a tether. “Potter, we cannot,” he says. He is terrified (he kissed Potter), he is bewitched (Potter kissed him). The boy closes his eyes, his chest heaving slightly. The black hair gentle in the slight wind. Potter nods.

_Fuck._

“You should not - trust me. I am not a good man, Potter,” he says.

_Fuck._

“I don’t think that’s true,” Potter answers, after a long pause. There is nothing to say, there is nothing they can do. Potter is as aware of the violation against natural law that they are, that they have committed. The Church brooks no argument on sex, taken in one bite by Eve from the apple. It is strictly for procreation and thusly for man and woman. Never is it meant for putting ourselves back together again. Never for they, two unusual creatures lost on a hillside, fumbling into the sun. They have mortally sinned already and come close to worse. _If someone had seen._ He looks around wildly, but there is nothing and no one but them on the Tor. _Thank fucking God._ Small favors. There is no mercy for unnatural men. He knows that the French will castrate monks upon finding them in each others’ arms. Later, if a second time, it is dismemberment. He crosses his arms and feels the weight of them, making sure they are still there.

“We cannot.”

 

* * *

 

Despite the white hair, the pitted skin and wrinkled face, the age-spots, Albus had never seemed _old_ to Severus until now. His laughter, the beat of his walk, was always impish and mischievous as a younger man. Now, as he holds the letter in his slightly-tremorous hand, Severus can see all the missed years. He sits in the abbot's office, surrounded and pressed in with Thomas and Horace.

“What is it?” Severus asks. He swims in dread. How many ways can the world end? There are so many. 

“I fear that the worst may be upon us,” Albus says in his soft way. His voice is always gentle as cotton. Like whipped egg whites, pastel twilight. “I have a letter from Cluny. Two thirds of them have died of the plague.” He looks up over the paper, brows furrowed. The lines in his face look deeper now, his skin greyer. “I do not think Hugh is prone to exaggeration.”

“What do we do?”

The abbot’s willowbark fingers massage his temples. “Nothing, Severus. What can we do? We can pray, my son. That is all.”

“The Jews are dying in Bohemia,” Thomas says, “They are killing them for poisoning the wells.” (They leave, some of them for Poland where Casimir, King of Kings, welcomes them with open arms.)

“What is causing this?” Horace, the cellarer, asks.

“Earthquakes, perhaps.” He has heard rumors. It seems plausible enough.

“It is the Lord. He is punishing us for wickedness.” Thomas says.

Later, as the others take their leave, Albus pauses and holds him back, “Severus, child. Wait a moment.” The abbot looks at the younger man. “I wanted to ask you how Harry is getting along. It’s a big transition to come here.”

“Why would I know? I don’t keep tabs on the blasted creature.”

“Be kind to him, my son. He’s fond of you.”

“He needs to rethink that choice.”

“Human hearts have a way of finding their own path, whether or not we’d like them to.” (He’d forgotten that Albus could read minds.) Severus looks away in shame, red tinting his throat, mottling his cheeks, tipping his ears. _Yes, well._ “Go in peace, my child.”

Later that night, he spends a long time sitting in the refectory hall after the meal, staring into the aching nothingness. The fire is dying. He glowers at the embers. Everyone has disappeared to their beds but a small number who linger, draining their tankards of the hop-drenched ale that the abbey is known for. He shivers in the chill, damp air. (God, he hates the winter.) “Here,” says a low voice (a voice raked over gravel and coals). Severus looks up to see Potter’s impassive face above him, a long, sunpainted hand reaching out to offer his cloak. “It’s cold tonight.” _Thank you_ sticks in his throat, dangerous as a chicken bone. He has never been good with kindness.

 

* * *

 

“What was it like, back in Cokeworth?”

“Why the bloody hell do you want to know?”

“I’m just making conversation.”

“Don’t underestimate the charms of silence compared to your prattling, Potter.”

Potter is quieted. “Sorry, sir.” (He does not sound sorry.) He pauses for a moment, worrying his ever-chapped bottom lip. “I overheard you in the ossuary. With Thomas. About the abbot.”

“He’s a miserable thing,” he says. Contempt curls his lip. “He won’t get what he wants, I’ll see to that.”

“I know,” Potter smiles, it is soft. Severus does not understand. The young man continued, eyes reading the book titles behind the Precentor, determined to ignore him, “It takes a lot of bravery to live your truth in this world, no matter what others want.” _Don’t say things like that, you miserable sod. It makes me believe you._ Potter had bid goodnight, gone up to his room. Severus stayed at the table, deep in his cups. He pauses for a long time on the way up, trying to breathe.

 

* * *

 

The Prime service is always quick. It is eight o’clock. Each member is itching to get on with their day. After Prime, he washes his face, his hands. The water is always cool.

“You look sullen, Severus,” Horace says. Severus doesn’t quite know how he feels about the old cellarer. Horace is a fool, that’s rather quite certain. He’s always been a bit too impressed with himself, a bit too impressed with others. But he is quick to compassion. He had guided Severus into monastic life twenty years prior, gently directing and guiding the snapping youth. He wants to slap the man, scream at him. He picks words with razor edges. (He wants to be held. _Tell me things. Tell me I am doing well, that all will be fine._ He never talks about these. They are buried deep, deep within.)

“Pity, I was rather hoping for saturnine.”

Horace chuckles, “So you are, so you are.”

When he finally retires, for that broken sleep between Vespers and Compline, he knows his mind will betray him. It is the worst kind of betrayal, there is nothing to prevent it. It is _inside_ him, it is insidious. Cut it out then, please, and restart. _Potter, do you have any idea? This old man, broken and defective. Do you know the things I think about you?_ His desire is never a gift, he wants to destroy the boy who inspired it. There are many ways to kill a man. We have gotten rather good at it over the centuries, inherited from the first wine-colored stain in the sand when Cain had turned to Abel, had _wanted_ , had _coveted,_ had _taken_ . (It is always there in the stories, that sick and miserable _want_.)

Take care of it then, cut it out at the root. He could come to Potter with the Inquisition’s methods. To be covered in honey and set upon by rats. Boiling oil, the brazen bull. Flayed, hanging, drawing and quartering. Yes, there are many ways. He knows most of them. He wants to boil Potter out of his skin. He had thought sin would feel good. This desire brings him no pleasure. It is sweltering, his clothes are always too tight. When Potter is near, Severus can feel the gallop of his heartbeat. _Please,_ he is desperate enough to pray, _please make it stop._

This is a sin, so many things lately are sins. He is quiet in the way the fabric shifts, in his movements. It is not so hard if you keep the arm still and the movement in the flick of your wrist. Imagine it, Potter’s hand. Strong, stout fingers and square, bitten nailbeds. That scar on the side of his thumb. Maybe he’ll take Severus tight, wrap his fingers around the base of the cock, palpate the shaft. Give a firm tug once or twice like pulling on a cord. Maybe he would be soft and teasing. Dance his fingertips over the hot flesh like ghosts, the dance of spiders. _Have you ever done this before?_ He cannot decide if he wants Potter shy or forthright but either way he sees the boy drenched in lust, his eyes massive and shattered in desire like craters, looking at him like the only thing in the world. _You and I together on the last night of the earth._ Lubrication isn’t really necessary if you go slow, do it like this, let your mind do the work, let your fingers graze. Then take that leak from the tip, clear and slick and smelling like the ocean (that salty grave). Slide it over, up and down, that’s right. Just like that. Do it so tight, hard against your own hand. There are no bones in his dick, humans are strange like that, but it feels just like there’s one, hard and about to break, stuffed just inside. He is good at this (he has had a lot of practice), yes, he knows just how he likes it. The parade of fantasies comes, visions of the boy. _I want you, oh fuck, the way I want you should never be allowed. I want to take you apart, I want you to take me apart. I would swallow you down, my nose against your stomach, your cock hot in my mouth. What do you smell like up close? Like earth, like parchment, like horsefeed? Are you also doing this, do you tease yourself? Are you quiet? Are you loud? Do you feel shame, like I do? (You should never feel shame, you are perfect.)_ He flicks through the images as quickly as he fucks his fist. When he’s on the edge, he pulls out his favorite. Potter, there, naked and under the stars, head punched back into the ground and a wide moan on his mouth, eyes shut tightly, screaming his name while Severus is buried so deep inside him, pulsating and coming like a quasar, their flesh fusing with brightness and heat down at the cellular. Come together and never apart.

His hand is sticky and it doesn’t take long for the dread to take up residence in his stomach again. Then again, it never does.


	4. Terce

_“But in her web she still delights_  
_To weave the mirror's magic sights,_  
_For often thro' the silent nights_  
_A funeral, with plumes and lights_  
_And music, came from Camelot:_  
_Or when the moon was overhead_  
_Came two young lovers lately wed;_  
_'I am half sick of shadows,' said_ _  
_       The Lady of Shalott.”

Alfred, Lord Tennyson, The Lady of Shalott

 

 _“I don’t know just where I’m going._ _  
_ _But I’m gonna try for the kingdom if I can.”_

The Velvet Underground, _Heroin_

 

_Let me write you a love poem._

_I am not good with words, I am a borrower of words. A magpie. A scavenger. I keep them here, under lock and key, in the library. I will use another language, of Abelard to Heloise. All plants move. We do not see them creep, they are very slow. They operate in a different measure of time, to them we appear impossibly fast. I will be slow with you, my long hands like ivy, Hedera genus, will curl around your ankles, up your legs. My stems, my shoots, heavy with chlorophyll and needy, running over your body. I will be as soft as a leaf when I touch you, open you up like a flower._

_Sometimes, people love monsters. It is not common. It is always a horror story. Why did Phasiphae kiss the bull? Did you see the wretched horror they unleashed into the world? If I touch you, what punishment would come down about us? I cannot risk it. Do not. Go, leave. Do not look back._

 

* * *

 

“Why did you join up? In the monastery?” Potter asks him. His boots shuffle along the frozen path. He never quite picks his feet up fully; Severus cannot stop hearing the swish swish swish of his dragged boots. _Indolent, lazy brat. You’re in for a hell of a surprise._

“Bloody hell, do you ever stop asking questions?” _That is not your story to hear._ Severus does not want to open that book, to pull out a sharpened stick, pick the pain out from his teeth. _Have you ever killed a man?_ (In his mind’s eye, he is still there. Standing over the broken form, a hole torn through the other man, blood spreading out on the ground like an inkdrop in water. He will never leave this spot. It follows him everywhere.)

“I’m sorry, sir.” Severus frowns, his dark hair falls into his face.

“Why did you?” he asks (he is not sure why he asks). Potter looks up at him surprised.

“Where else was I gonna go?” it is soft and quiet and bitter deadly. Severus nods; he understands. The abbot is a collector of lost causes. They, neither of them had had any other options. A frown curls over the boy’s mouth, he bites his lip (Severus looks away). “I’m almost done with my six months,” he says, Severus knows he is referring to his postulancy. It will be soon that the boy must make a decision, to take the black cowl or go forth into the world. “What if -” he pauses, “What if I’m not sure?”

“About joining the abbey?”

“About everything.” Severus knows the correct answer. He knows that to doubt the very existence of God, of Heaven, is a sin against the virtue of religion. He knows he should respond with the catechism, encourage Potter to embrace his doubt as explorations of the mysteries of the Lord. That trials of faith exist, strewn across the path by God and Satan, to further refine and strengthen conviction. This is the _correct_ answer.

He doesn’t want that.

Goddammit, he wants to be honest with Potter. (He doesn’t know why, just that it would be good to be honest with _someone_ for one in his rotten life.) He is unsure he believes in God. God is for other men, for less skeptical men. If God exists, he is cruel and uncaring. He hates God (if, _if_ he exists, the ever-asked question). “I’ve never been sure, Potter,” he mutters. Evergreen eyes blink at him in surprise. The boy’s mouth gapes open slightly, speckled with spit. Severus’ nails dig into the palms of his hands, drawing blood. (Severus is a sinner. May God have mercy on his soul.)

 

* * *

 

 

Terce is a holy prayer of conflict. In Terce, reflect upon the conflict of your life, of religious life. Invite the Holy Spirit in, let it fill you like water might fill a jug. The altar cruet, cast in silver gilt, where water mixes with wine for the Holy Communion. Confession comes after,  at mid-morning. He is never short on things to confess. (He has more than usual lately.) Confess to the inflexibility. Confess to jealousy, to overindulgence, to not giving enough attention to God. There are acceptable sins. There are the ones that go unspoken.

He stops in front of a statue of Mary, carved in limestone and given to the abbey by visitors from Bohemia. It is his particular favorite treasure of the abbey’s, although he has never seen anyone other than himself stop and consider it. It is done in the style of the Italian _Pieta_ or the German _Vesperbild_ . Mary, crouching with her long folds of fabric tumbling about her, the body of her child removed from the cross, lain into her arms and death’s alike. It is difficult to fathom, the Virgin in her grief. Her face turns to the viewer with eyes closed in despair, yet solemn. The detail work is finer than usual. He eyes the puncture wounds in the relaxed hands, the cascade of fabric, set of the jaw. It is an increasingly popular image for artists. There are a few more of these _Evening Images_ , as the scene is called, scattered about the monastery. This one though, just outside of the chapel, is his favorite. _What are you thinking?_

 

* * *

 

 

Binding is the final step in the production of a manuscript. Today, he is binding a book of hours, freshly completed and illuminated. The parchment pages must be collected, organized into the final order. Some books are never completed. They sit on the library’s shelves in loose, stitched pages. They are written into the list of books by the librarian as _in quaternis._ Partition the pages into groupings, called gatherings. The gatherings are then each stitched with cords along the spine. The stitching is usually done with the assistance of a sewing frame. Wooden and upright on the desk, sewing is always the most time-consuming part of bookbinding. There are many stitches that can be used, a herring-bone, a kettle stitch. The boards to finish the piece with covers vary from place to place. In England, in Glastonbury, oak is preferred. It is taken from the very clutches of trees that surround the abbey. The library has many books from further afield. In Italy, they prefer beechwood and pine. These woods are lighter than English oak, they feel less heavy to pick up, carry about. Now structurally sound, the cover of the piece can now be decorated. Covered in leather, tanned, and dyed. Perhaps stamped or wrapped in fabric, called a chemise, or perhaps set with precious stones to be later stolen by uneasy hands.

It is difficult to focus on his task while Potter is so close, learning the art of copying text. Potter proves to be skilled with a brush. He will trial in each position during his postulancy. Dire dread starts in his neck, in his shoulders, in the pit of his stomach. _Look at him there, in front of the windows, hair the color of witchcraft, like black flame._ He cannot be expected to spend hours of each day in the youth’s presence, he is terrified of betraying himself. He might slip once, in excitement over a beautiful piece, a new acquisition. Potter would turn in kind, stars exploding in his eyes. Severus would kiss him. Touch him. Push him up against a wall. Knock the ink to the floor, let it spread out like an ocean. The wine-dark damp. He wants someone to beg (he is not sure which). This _cannot_ be allowed.

“Did I do well?” Potter asks, brow and cupid-bow mouth quirked in the manner of one who already knows. Severus says nothing. He looks at the boy, who is cut like Heracles from stone. He looks at his own grey hands. He is wasted, he is so _tired_ . It is pathetic the way he compares himself to this twenty-year-old. It is remarkable how quickly time had weathered him, had eroded his skin, withered his muscle. He sleeps poorly, his body aches when it rains. It is harder to climb the stairs to the library than it had been five years ago or ten. He gets heartburn after acidic foods. It is strange how quickly age had atrophied him. He is a ruin of a man, old and exhausted and absolutely _worthless_.

_This cannot be borne. I should never have touched you._

(Grendel had not been born a monster. It had happened gradually, as he sat in the uncomfortable presence of his mother’s love. His mother, who held him too _tight_ , who put words in his mouth, who said _this is my son_ and never gave him a name. They, neither of them, had needed names until hundreds of years later when the men came and had built Heorot. They had locked Grendel out, had not invited him to dinner, and in his misery of being cut off he had learned hate, had learnt cruelty, had learned the taste of flesh and of copper-scented blood. The men had named him _Grendel_ in their horror. They had needed something to shout in warning as he drew near. They had never met his mother, she stays at the bottom of the lake, nameless.)

 

* * *

 

“Potter, what are you doing out of bed?”

“I was just looking for some bread,” Potter says, grinning the grin of the successful.

“Get out of the kitchen, you worthless creature,” he snaps, “or I’ll report you to the abbot for penance.” The kitchen is large and octagonal. Flying buttresses attach to the top, winging off into the sky. Each cornice wears a grinning gargoyle. Severus has always been partial to the odd statues. He likes the heat of the kitchen from the flames, pouring out of the four very large, arched fireplaces.

 _I am half-sick of shadows._ (He is cold, he is tired.) Salt. He has always known the taste of salt. It was there in the salted cod, in the flavor of angry tears, the taste of his own sweat as it dripped onto his mouth. Salt comes from the sea, from the earth (from Severus himself, he knew the taste of the sea long before he’d ever seen the shore).

“Don’t drink that,” he mutters, pushing a bottle toward the boy, “it’s as awful as the foul stuff in Cokeworth.” Potter looks up at him, surprised. Awkwardness curls up from his feet, wraps around his legs, settles in his pursed mouth.

“What were you doing down here?” He asks again, scowling at nothing in particular.

“What were _you_ doing? You’re out of bed too.”

“I am a senior member of the order. I'm making night rounds, you idiot, making sure foolish brats like _you_ are in bed. Now answer the question.”

“I can’t sleep.”

“None of us sleep, Potter. Just lay in bed and get used to it,” he sighs. “Next time, at least, if you plan to steal from the kitchens, do endeavor to do it when it’s not _my_ watch.”

“You know, you’ve almost been nice to me lately,” the impertinent brat says, the ghost of a smile on his face. _I am not here to join your simpering fan club,_ he thinks. A vision of Vernon Dursley, Lord Norfolk, floats into his mind. He remembers the callouses on the knuckles of the man’s hand, the boy’s uncontrolled flinch at quick movements. He clenches his molars and says nothing, gathers his things and stalks away. _What’s the matter with you?_ He wonders. Nothing, nothing is the matter with him. The great nothing burns him up, wide and sparse and tasting of ash and air. It is going to kill him someday, nothing. Clog his arteries, raise his blood pressure. It huddles up in his blood like a old man’s sugar. _What was it that got him?_ They will ask one day over his deathbed. _It was nothing._

 

* * *

 

Potter stomps like an elephant when he’s angry. Severus’ eyelid twitches slightly, his quill jumps. A spot of ink appears on the page where the nib paused. He is cataloguing recent library acquisitions from Cluny Abbey, deep in central France. Most were the usual sort of reflections on devotion and interpretations on teachings of the early Church Fathers. There is also, however, a small volume of Plato’s _Republic_ that he is particularly excited about. Most of the Greek and Roman texts do not get lent out.

“You _denied_ me in the scriptorium?” Potter’s eyes flash like sun off a mirror, like Greek fire. He can see the anger throbbing in the boy’s neck, the stain of betrayal flushing across his pale face. Neither of them are good at anger, they both enjoy it too much.

“You did not meet standards,” he glares. He does not look up, pausing over an entry of the _Epistles_ of Saint Gregory the Great.

“Are you fucking kidding me?”

“Language, Potter,” the hiss is soft.

“You absolute _bastard_ ,” Potter bites, “there is no way that is true.”

“You might be nursing the delusion that everyone here in the abbey is impressed with you, Potter. That you are good at everything. I do not regret to inform you of how utterly wrong you are. There are some of us who know you for the arrogant creature you are.” Eyes flash, like burning pitch. Like the deaths of stars. “Do not forget,” he hisses, “ I could _ruin_ you, Potter, you could be expelled for speaking to me this way.”

“This isn’t fair, I can’t believe you get to be mean as piss to me and I have to take it,”

“Nevertheless, I am your superior. You must,”

“Fuck you, Snape,” his face wild and violent. Through his red anger, Severus is uncomfortably delighted by the boy. The way they yell at each other is a little bit, if you look at it, like fucking. If he cannot have the youth, (take Potter, lick him down from lip to thigh, take his dick in the palm of his sweaty hand, in his mouth, god, he needs to be told to _shut up_ ), then he’ll take this instead.

_Go on, Potter, get the hell out of here._

He looks at the sky, rubbing one pale hand against his tired, deepset eyes. Heavy and grey, it looks exactly the way it had always done in Yorkshire. (He goes later to the abbot and amends his grade to passing. The sin he cites is _jealousy._ It is not lust, it is never lust.) He is good at closing doors; he is good at walking away. They have been shut so many times in his own face, it’s hard not to learn a thing or two.


	5. Sext

_“The seventh year after it began, it came to England and first began in the towns and ports joining on the seacoasts, in Dorsetshire, where, as in other counties, it made the country quite void of inhabitants so that there were almost none left alive._

_... But at length it came to Gloucester, yea even to Oxford and to London, and finally it spread over all England and so wasted the people that scarce the tenth person of any sort was left alive.”  
_Geoffrey the Baker, Chronicon Angliae

 _"You're a ghost la la la_  
_You're a ghost_  
_I'm in the church and I've come_  
_To claim you with my iron drum"_  
John Cale, Paris 1919

 

_1348_

_Six months later_

 

It is summer. That terrifies him.

The reports say it is worse in the summer. Winter had been a momentary reprieve in the eye of the storm. He is not sure why. It seems like the heat of the summer helps the miasma to spread, stretching its foul fingers out further and further afield.

(He has always preferred winter.)

More are sick on the Continent. More are dead. A report comes from Dorset in June. A sailor (he has always mistrusted the sea) from Gascony had come down with the plague. It is their first casualty on English shores. He had thought the tales were exaggerated, that this had been a myth, a ghost story told around fires, sailor to sailor. The seafarers are rife with their superstitions, their phantom ships. Severus had seen the pallor of the visiting Cisterian monk who had come in July wearing a white face and the clench of dread. He hears the reports from Paris, the names of the dead stretch on for pages.

He believes the stories now.

Sicily had fallen in the previous October (twelve galleys had entered port, bearing the dead like biers). Pisa had fallen shortly after, turning the ships away in panic. They had carried on then to Marseille, had docked like ghost ships piloted by skeleton hands. By the time the Marseillais knew it had landed on their soil, they were already dead.

It waits, it creeps. (It won’t be known for hundreds of years, that tiny bacterium _Yersinia pestis,_ which breaks into cells like a horse into Troy.) It rises from over the Asiatic steppes, the howling and dusty winds, on the backs of marmots fleeing from North India, China, Mongolia. It is lobbed over the walls in Feodosia in 1346 by a Tatar army. It was one of the first cases of biological warfare, using their catapults to load up the corpses of the miserable, diseased dead and throw them over the ramparts into the unfortunate city.

The infected towns run from their sickhouses in terror. Severus knows they bring the foul air with them. Where they go, the pestilence follows. All cities and towns bar their doors, their walls, in the vain hope that it might, like the seventh plague, pass over them. If they could paint their doors with the blood of lambs, they would. The plague bears no kindness, it doesn’t care for rank nor wealth. It comes for all men. He knows this, he waits for it to come to him. He knows it will hurt, that the end is near and black. He had heard the screams the year before, all the way from Constantinople across the Bosphorus.

There is nothing to do but wait.

Potter rarely looks at him these days. Or, perhaps, he looks at him too much?  Despite the easing of the grade and allowance to pursue entry into illumination work, the boy had instead elected to assist the giant of a guestmaster, russet-bearded Rubeus Hagrid. Severus had never particularly _liked_ Hagrid (he doesn’t like anyone), but he was relieved to note that Potter didn’t try to follow Thomas into the sacristry. Men who had grown up with nothing, he has seen, tend to go one of two ways about treasure. Thomas is obsessive about things. Their history, their value. He collects them, rarely dragging them out unless instructed to. Perhaps he is a good sacrist, Severus doesn’t know. He has never cared much for _things_.

He watches Potter from a distance. The newly-made novice is careful in his work, approaching each guest with attention. He keeps the rooms meticulous, the horses fed. He sees that the youth is quick to relate to animals. Potter likes to brush the horses after feeding, pat them on their strong necks, swat the flies away. He is quick to pet a cat, pausing after a mouse. He always watches the birds, particularly fond of owls. Severus wonders, not for the first time, what it would be like to be under that same care, that same gentle focus. He would like to transform into a creature, curl up at Potter’s feet. He suspects it would be the calmest place in the world to sleep.

Potter had put the black robe on. He had completed his postulation and entered his year as a novice. Severus regrets the shapeless black tunic, fitted with scapular and cowl, that conceals Potter’s form. He doesn’t say it. (He is pleased as well, for the relief.) It aches in a weird discomfort that digs in somewhere between his shoulders. Potter should belong to the world, he is too bright for this dusty tomb of God. (Severus is pleased in a base way, in a greedy way, in a mortal way. He does not want Potter to leave. He frowns, furrows his brow. _Stop this, you wretched fool._ ) It is a quiet ceremony, the naming ceremony, as Potter enters his novitiate year. He had stood before the long-haired abbot, in front of Severus (whom he did not look at), in front of the entire monastic community. “What is your request?” Albus had asked.

“I seek the mercy of God and fellowship in this community,” Potter had answered, voice ever-quiet and even. (Severus is sure that his voice was not as sure-footed twenty years prior.)  Potter had stretched out his palms (it reminds him of a time the boy had stood before him, palms up, asking if he should believe at all). He receives the familiar uniform. The habit, black as their sins, black as the darkness below the ocean where monsters lie. The belt, the long length of the scapular.

He thinks of his mother. He thinks of Mary, Mother of God, named for bitterness. He thinks of Potter, named Harry, whose name means power, means ruler. Beautiful as a mythological prince. Beautiful as Heracles, who was the son of a god, who had powerful shoulders, a strong neck, wide back. Who had fought the monsters and won. ( _Goddamn you, Severus, you disgusting creeping thing. This is not for you, this will never be yours. Stop it, stop wanting. For fuck’s sake, pick up your long cloak of darkness and get it the fuck together._ )

_He doesn’t like you anyway. It doesn’t matter._

_And you don’t like him._

They dance around each other in the abbey. He knows it. He is infuriated by it, he doesn’t know why they both cannot leave it well _alone_ . There are plenty of other monks that Potter pays no attention to. Plenty of other monks whom Potter does not look at. Does not catch across the refectory hall, eyes dark and hooded and a curled sulk in those mossy eyes and soft mouth. There has always been a strange something between them, he does not know what. It doesn’t matter. It is intolerable. He is as frustrated as kindling about to catch. He knows something will happen, is bound to happen. His skin is hot and prickled. He thinks of another day on a hillside. Potter, surprised, sucking at him like a lamprey eel. Their tongues slick and knotted. His hands, pulling at the boy’s skin, as if he could take away pieces, cut them out. Put them in a pocket for later, to keep. _I want you._ God, those are terrible words. They sound so lazy. How can he state the _size_ of the want, how it centers in his core, could collapse his very being around it? Perhaps, perhaps later it will pass. Lust is always temporary. He knows it does not matter, that though the infection might be drained, the damaged, abscessed pocket where it once was will remain. He is no longer whole, there are gaps in him that have opened up, waiting for someone to fill them.

Potter. _You look good in black._ Severus would impale a man with a withering glare if they would dare to suggest he had such a ridiculous thing as a favorite color. He does, he cannot help it. It is black. Black is everything and nothing. It is the absorption of all color or the absence of everything. It can represent so _much_. Evil, perhaps, yes, but also knowledge and sin, severity and nothingness. There is no gentleness to black, it does not come in shades. It was one of the first colors used in cave paintings by ancient Neolithic creatures. They had burnt their sticks and scribbled on stone. Black is the color of most of our words, our knowledge. The Romans created their ink, vine black, from scorched grapevine branches. Ivory black, that other ancient recipe for ink, comes from our very bodies, from charred bones mixed with oil and drawn up into a quill. The color of they, the Benedictines. Of sin and Hell, of the vastness of the night sky, the darkness of our own pupils tunneled to nowhere. He is fond of black. (It looks good with Potter’s eyes.)

 _There is nothing for you here, Severus._ Tuck your tail between your legs, boy, flee. (He does not look away. That skin is like the moon, smooth as the lake surface. He studies the growth of the beard, the closely-cropped and night-colored curls. Potter, who was born of the lion in the summer, who is named for power. He is so much _more_ than Severus, old and dark and dank, who was born in the winter to earth, who is named, instead, for inflexibility and austerity. _I was doomed from the start._ )

Potter hates him now. Fuck. _It doesn’t matter._

 

* * *

 

“This is the right place for him, my son,” the abbot says. (God, he hates how Albus always _knows._ He is not sure the man isn’t a magician like Merlin, he is not sure Albus isn’t able to read thoughts.)

“He’s too young,” he says. Too young, too curious, his mouth and eyes are open too wide. _He cannot be kept here._ No, he needs to be pushed out of this viper nest, take those curious eyes (that wet mouth) into the world.

“Plenty are younger,”

“No, the brat is too angry, he’s an impudent cretin who cannot listen _for once_ to his elders,”

“That will come with time,” Albus says, smiling his private smile, “There have been others like him.”

“Father,” Severus says, tone hard-edged.

“Father Abbot!” Hagrid calls from the end of the hall, “there’s a man just arrived.” His face is grim, “it’s here, it’s the plague.”

The sick man had brown hair and brown eyes. For some reason that seems important to Severus. As soon as he sees the the unlucky man, it’s clear that there is not long left. He picks something to remember him as, something simply more than plague victim. No, instead then, let us remember the brown hair, the brown eyes. Past that, he remembers more. The sick swollen buboes, rising like mushroom caps from his throat, nestled just below the jaw. They streak with purple and yellow, rampant infection. The rattled cough, the groaning. The vomiting, the foul, salty, bitter smells of the dead and the dying. He dies twelve hours later, as a young monk lays wet cloth over his head. One last speckled breath and then nothing. He was the first.

After that, the victims begin to spill into the abbey horrifyingly quickly. The plague spreads as rapidly as an inkstain, consuming all men in its wake. The desperate come from the nearby village. The monks are better than doctors. The ill speak of the medicinal garden in hushed, hopeful tones, clinging to the idea of a cure like a talisman. (Neville sighs, these herbs do not work against this pestilence. Nothing does. Some get lucky, are blessed by fate. Most do not.)

“Can we bar the door?” Thomas asks. "Keep them out of here."

“We are in service of the Lord, Thomas,” he snaps, “we give comfort in times of need.” ( _You godforsaken snake. I hope you’re terrified._ )

It had struck quickly. They die in their beds. He can smell the sick from miles away, ever creeping and ever cloying. He stuffs bits of cotton in his nose, desperate to stave off the foul miasma. He knows that if the stink touches him, Death with his scythe will follow shortly after. There is no hope for plague, there never has been. Even Hippocrates and Galen, those colossal giants of medicine, give little guidance. They tell him to give up the ghost, abandon all hope. _Cito, Longe, Tarde_ are their words in Latin, which Severus knows intimately. It is never far from his mind. “Leave quickly, go far away and come back slowly.”

He could leave if he wanted to. Run, run, Severus, far away to where the pestilence is not. If you can keep running, then Death cannot keep up. But Death and Pestilence, those old foul horsemen, are quick runners. There is nowhere they are not already. He has nowhere to run. The putrid condition had poured in from the east, from Issyk-Kul, cradle of the black plague. It is marked by dusky stains, subcutaneous hemorrhaging. You can smell it in the decomposed. In the pomanders that the frantic carry to keep the foul air away. Juniper, ash, vine, rosemary. They write rules, guidelines for how to keep the body healthy and free from the disease. They do not eat fish from the sea, swallow their eggs cured in vinegar. Leeches are applied carefully to the ill, bleeding the sick out from their veins in red threads of wretchedness.

 

* * *

 

 

Severus gets lost in his work, desperate to put as much of himself down on parchment, aware suddenly of his own mortality. The dying isn’t the worst bit, it is the _forgetting._ The more of himself he can spill out into words, into his work with a brush, the more likely is the remembering. He is terrified of a future, likely not too distant, where his name will mean _nothing_ , his suffering nothing, his bones will be nameless dust. He wants to scream into the sky, _yes, yes, yes I have lived._

He stares at the half-finished sketch on the parchment, graphite staining his hands.

Parchment is not like paper. It is the skin of an animal. Parchment, called _pergamenum_ in Latin, can be made from any animal if you’re dedicated enough. Vellum, similar in creation, is always from a cow’s hide. It is a slow, tedious process to turn a creature into a blank slate. First, select the hide in the abattoir. Then wash it in cool, clean running water for one day and one night until it is clean enough. The skin will, as all natural and dead things tend to do, begin to rot and the hair will release and fall out like dry pine needles. If you need it done faster, you can soak the skins in a mixture of lime and water, stirring regularly with long and splintered wooden poles. Then lay the skins flat. Scrape at them with a knife, removing the bristles. Rinse, repeat. The skin is then stretched tightly on a wooden frame and dried, flat as a board. As the skin dries, it will shrink, so it cannot be nailed to the frame or it will tear. Instead, small pebbles are pushed into the edges and cord is wrapped around, it is tied to the frame and can be adjusted as it dries. Parchment is like leather, it is ever-durable, far more than paper. It will last longer than us all, for thousands of years.

He needs more parchment. He needs more monks to _use_ the parchment. But the parchment-makers are ill, the monks are ill. (Seven of them, as of that morning. Fear clogs his arteries, stiffens his joints.)

 

* * *

 

He sits in the pews of the cathedral after the mid-day prayer of Sext, head bowed. He is not praying. He has tried, he does not know what to say. (He is so tired. He knows he should get up, move on to another task. Care for the ill. Change the buckets, change the straw. Instead he sits there without energy to move. _An object at rest._ ) He thinks instead of the prayer. It is always on the Crucifixion. He studies the man on the cross, nailed like a common piece of wood. The art of the thing is basic and rather ugly. He’s never liked it. _They’ve done you a disservice,_ he thinks.

Sext is the prayer hour of fullness. It is usually a quick office, not as prominent as Lauds or Vespers, and consists of typically three psalms, a hymn, a lesson, the Kyrie Eleison. They are recited when the sun is at its peak, a time to think of divine splendor and divine grace. In this prayer, one asks God for health and peace of mind, reflects upon temptation and turns aside. _I could learn a thing or two._

He sees the soles of the buskin boots before Potter speaks. They are leather, scuffed. Brown. _Fuck. Not now._

“Do you need help up there?” Potter asks, it is very quiet. “I know a lot of the copyists are ill now.”  Severus is surprised. _Did Albus put him up to this?_ (He doesn’t understand how Potter could swallow his own pride, come to the place of hurt, the place of wounding. Offer his help like it is the simplest thing in the world. Severus is weak and petty. He could not do such a thing. He is irritated at still another of Potter’s examples of goodness and light, cast from the gods. Not a monster, no.)

He narrows his bleak, suspicious eyes, “Did someone send you?”

Potter blinks, surprised, “No, I was just thinking about how I could help.” His eyes are bright and round, firelight dances in the irises (green as clover). “And I thought you might need some.” _Jesus, what are you? What are you doing to me?_

(It is not fair, monsterhood. He had thought that to be a monster was to have agency, to be the actor in the poem. Monsters are free to pursue their dreams, their desires. It is the hero that is the villain, who punishes Geryon for daring to be quiet, daring to love thunder, to feed his cattle and go on Sundays to the market. He did not realize that it is the other way around, monsters are always a reaction to the hero. They are set up by fate to be the foil in someone else’s story, vanquished and moved on, forever forgotten. Most do not have names. Chimera, hydra, dragon. He is lucky, at least, he has a name. It is sour and harsh, picked out of the gutter by his mother, eight-and-a-half months pregnant, who had wanted to have the thing over with. But it is there, all three syllables. He has a name.)


	6. None

_“Quid me nutrit me destruit.”  
__(That which nourishes me also destroys me.)_  
Latin proverb

 _“A medicine for the plague... Take an egg that is newly laid, and make a hole in either end, and blow out all that is within. And lay it to the fire and let it roast till it may be ground to powder, but do not burn it. Then take a quantity of good treacle, and mix it with chives and good ale. And then make the sick drink it for three evenings and three mornings.”_  
Edward IV’s Plague Medicines, 1480 ****  
****

_"White light, white light goin' messin' up my mind_  
 _White light, and don't you know its gonna make me go blind_  
 _White heat, aww white heat it tickle me down to my toes_  
 _White light, Oh have mercy white light have it goodness knows"_  
The Velvet Underground, White Light/White Heat

 

The growths are the beginning. Once you feel the discomfort of the swelling, in your armpit, at your groin, below your neck, you are already welcoming Death across your door. They grow until nearly bursting, as large as an apple and not nearly as sweet, thick with pus and fluid. The malady takes its evil course from there as necrotic black spots appear at the distal ends of fingers and toes, freckling the extremities. The fever spikes, the affected begin to vomit, first stomach contents, then bile and blood. Death comes after two to seven days. (The lucky ones, the ones that show no growths, no spots, no signs of distress, come down with the septicaemic plague. For them, death is an afterthought. It is fast, filling the blood up with millions of rapidly-multiplying bacteria. A healthy man can grow sick in sleep and die in the night without ever waking.)

They do not know where it comes from. (Severus does, he had seen the report from the Paris medical faculty to the king. It had come from a syzygy in the heavens, three planets in conjunction that had sent the miasma, had spoilt the air. It is the fault of Jupiter, Mercury, and Mars. He knows that the heavens are the seat of God and that this pestilence is sent by the Lord. He is not a good man. It will come for him. He waits.)

“Do you think this is it, Severus?” Potter asks, wide-eyed. (Severus looks, as he always does, for a hint of redness to the whites of his eyes. A swelling at the jaw, the neck. He sees nothing. He hates himself, a little, for his fear.) “Do you think this is the end of the world?”

He closes his eyes, “I don’t know.” He thinks of his mother, blackhaired with small hands. _“Don’t provoke him, Severus,_ ” she had said. Don’t provoke the beast. His father with his stinking breath, reeking of ale and the three pennies he has to rub together. “Are ya lookin’ to be beat today, boy?” his father had said, grinning the grin of the sadist, the malevolent. (He imagines his father daydreams about new ways to whip him. Severus, twelve-years-old and skinny as a pole, with dark suspicious eyes and greasy dark hair, is his muse to cruelty. No wonder he’d grown up vicious and biting; he’d studied under the best.)

“Do you love him?” he’d asked his mother once in desperation (he cannot _stand_ it, it is anathema.) He had fussed with his hair, his clothes. _Why don’t you hit back? Leave? Run away. Never see him again. We could go to the east, back to the stories. To Wallachia. Is grandmother there? How far is it? Will you take me?_

“It was never about love,” she had said. Her voice falling in soft, accented syllables, her face forever hard and set. He does not know why his mother had married his father. There are many reasons a woman might choose a husband that he will never understand. He imagines she had to have loved his father once, why else would you put up with such a bastard? He hates the idea of love (he’s never been sullied with it). It steals agency, dignity, principle. Men do base and idiotic things for love. _I will never do that._

He cannot get the boy out of his mind. _Fuck._ It is strange, this desire in the face of Hell. To crave touch. He is not a man used to touch, he does not know where this _need_ is born from. (Humans are strange creatures. Fear drives us to many things. Severus watches parents abandon their children as they catch ill. He sees the mothers turn away from their plague-ridden daughters, the fathers close the door in their feverish sons’ faces. He also sees the fearful reach out for touch, for comfort. At the end of the world, you will find us all gripping tightly at each other, blindly rutting, naked and desperate, afraid and sublime.)  

He has been touched once.

Potter is strangely close to him. He can smell the ink from his little jar (syrupy, like corked wine, like day-old blood). Can scent the memory of the stables he had tended to in the morning, woven in hay and horsesweat. He can feel the heat from the boy’s body. It slips through the air, through the black wool of his habit, up and tight against his skin. It feels almost deliberate but the boy’s face is relaxed and artless. He swallows, it sticks in his throat. This is not a sin he can bring to confession. He will die with it on his tongue, like the Greeks with their coins. He needs to move away (he cannot move away).

He thinks of ivy. It crawls over things with grasping, needy stems and tendrils. It goes anywhere it likes, takes anything it wishes. He cannot have Potter, cannot touch the boy, as a man. Consider instead if he were a cut of ivy. He could creep up on Potter, curl around his ankles, in between his toes. Spread leaves out over his skin, brush him with pale unripe berries. Could stain him with the faint ink of green chlorophyll. Marked, smelling of sunlight and cell division. Yes, perhaps ivy.

Later at night, in his blank cell, he dreams of the young man. He’d rather drown himself. _Potter, you dangerous thing_ . Potter is strange and bright and surreal. Who seeks him out, despite his old sharp tongue. His dreams are the ideal of sin. Potter, his dark tunic open, his chest bare to the sky. He is exposed on Severus’ work desk, the parchment shoved to the side, the graphite ink staining the floor. Severus knots his hands in that birdnest of crow-dark hair, that long neck exposed like a feast. _Look at me,_ he hisses, he craves those odd eyes, those strange fir-green eyes, that seem ever young and old simultaneously. He cannot bear to have Potter look away, _I want you to know it is me. I need you to know it is me doing this to you._ His hands reach down, lower, slick with oil (in his greatest blasphemy he knows it is the holy anointing oil of myrrh), take hold. What would he feel like held within his fist? Severus has never touched another man, all he can do is picture a mirror of his own self. What would it be like to dip his tongue into that hollow at the boy’s throat? Would it taste like dirt? (Like nectar?) _I want to claim you. Mark you. I want you to walk through the world with the impression of our fucking. I would like to tease you, make you whine for me. (I cannot, I am impatient, I cannot wait.) I want to explore you, discover you. I will get my ropes, my lamps, my tools. Hush, I am making a map of you, your body. Where you end and I begin. It is not always so clear. If I get turned around while lost inside you, wait a little while. I might find my way back (I am not sure I want to)._ All the other monks in his dormitory are sick or dead, he takes his chance where he can in the silence and lets himself be brutal. He bites back a moan out of habit. The world explodes in white light, white heat.

 _Fuck._ He washes his face and hands with the cool water in the basin, glaring at his reflection. _What do you see? When you look at me?_

(Ivy is a strange plant. _Hedera helix_. It is common, creeping, crawling. It is the destroyer of buildings, of civilizations. It is proof that life will start again in our demise. It can ruin stonework, flay iron, hide structural faults. It does not mean cruelty, yet it walks with it hand in hand. Leaf in leaf. It is good for a cough. Ivy does not take much care, it is often left without attention, steeped in neglect. In neglect, ivy grows ever upward toward the sky.)

 

* * *

 

“Burn them. Burn the bodies,” he realizes as he says the words that it is the only available course of action. He has heard the rumors from the distant villages who have stooped to the deplorable act. He knows that where the dead are destroyed, there are fewer new cases of the illness. _These are desperate times._ He is willing to try anything. (He is a despicable man. In this time of need, all he wants is for the dying to be quiet. He is sick with shame. _Please, please stop._ )

“What about their salvation?” Thomas says. Horror colors the sacrist’s narrow face. The rapture looms, surely, not so far away. To desecrate the body, to ruin their chance to be physically resurrected, to walk hand in hand with Christ into Heaven, it is a foul and evil thing.

“Damn their salvation, save the _living_.”

“That is not our mission, Severus,” Thomas says, “we are consecrated to the Lord. We shepherd their souls. Do not lose faith in the face of fear.”  (Severus has no faith to lose.)

“Damn the mission.”

“You took a _vow_ ,” Thomas hisses, his eyes narrow and red in the candlelight. He reminds Severus, uncomfortably, of a snake. Thomas doesn’t give a damn about the common man’s salvation. Severus is perfectly aware of this. _You just want the godforsaken abbot’s seat. You don’t even want to let the sick in. Fuck you._

“Fuck my vow. And I will abandon that vow happily,” he bites out, “to keep any living man _alive_.”

“You’re a damn fool, Severus.” (Yes, yes, that is true.) He sneers at Thomas's angry face.

"Good."

“You’re not a believer, how can you doubt?”  _How can you doubt?_ Thomas had hissed. _The sky is empty,_ Severus thinks, _how can you not?_ How many, many times has he looked to the sky in prayer? Asked for a sign? The clouds have never shifted, the light has never changed. _Put your faith in the Lord,_ everyone says. At some point, he would like to see some kind of return. He wishes he could just get it over with. Maybe he’ll pack his things up and disappear, leave the abbey. Maybe he’ll open a tavern, sell ale, profess nothing to God. ( _Where would he go? There is nowhere but here.)_ Doubt bothers men. It is easier to say yes, _this_ , this is true. The world was born on _this_ date, a Tuesday perhaps. It was created in seven days. So-and-so begot so-and-so, and his son and his son’s son and on and on. They can be facts if we wish them to be. Facts put covers over the empty spaces, give us handles to cling to. Take them away and a great nothingness stares back. All we can feed it are our own fears, our own base selves. The worst thing about staring into nothing is that you often find yourself staring right back.

 

* * *

 

 

He is back again for prayer, shoulders slumped in the hard wooden pew. His stomach rumbles; he has forgotten to eat again. Same old, same old. Dinner will be soon, always shortly after the None prayer. The prayer explores the mystery of Christ’s death. He is tired of thinking about death. It is everywhere. He can’t escape it, can’t dig it out. It’s like a thorn, an abscessed tooth. Rotten, painful, unable to be ignored. Here they go, on and on again, reliving the past.

“Say something to Him, Severus.” Albus had said.

“What could I possibly have to say?” He does not have the words in Latin. He knows that you speak to God in Latin. In Greek, in Hebrew. (The Egyptians, even in their queer way, in Coptic. It is different there, in _Khmet_ , the land of sand.) You do not do it in such a base language as _English._ Even the king does not stoop to English (the king in his court, who speaks the language of the conquerors). He cannot imagine the foul creature Dante, who spits in God’s face with his common words, his vulgar Italian.

How can he possibly explain his sins to God in Heaven? _I am in love with a man of the cloth; I could be his father. I don’t want to hear the screams of the dead anymore. I am so tired; I want to sleep. O God, where are you now?_

The Flagellents fascinate him, they had been founded in the east but had flourished in Germany. He doesn’t know if he is drawn to or revolted by the self-flagellation. They wander from town to town in silence, two by two, with the women in the back. They wear their awful hair shirts, beating themselves in public acts of repentance. When they peel the hair shirts away, baring their wounds to the crowds, the blood seeps from thousands of cuts. The sickness is sent from above, they say. God is punishing us for our sins. Others take less violent measures, none are steeped in logic. Severus sneers. Some strap chickens to their buboes, some drink arsenic. Others carry sweet pomanders of herbs and flowers, desperate to purify the air.

They are all desperate. Even old Clement VI, sitting on his apostolic seat from Avignon. He had been one of them once, a black monk of the Benedictines, had risen to become Bishop of Arras, then a Cardinal. _It is punishment for our sins_ , Clement had said, as he stood watching the black creeping death encroach upon France. Saturn, Jupiter, and Mars had been in conjunction in 1341. The old superstitious man sought the opinion of astrologers and physicians. He was told that surrounding himself with torches would block the illness, so he goes nowhere without. Avignon had run out of ground for cemeteries, for graveyards. They then had looked to the river, consecrating the entire Rhone as holy ground, pitching the dead in to be washed away to sea. He wishes they would die quicker (he is an evil wretch).

He’d thought that truly sinning would feel better. He sighs, gives up. Instead, he pushes against his own thighs, rising to wash his hands for dinner. He doesn’t particularly like meals. They are a miserable function that he’s forced to attend. The fare is always uninspired. A bit of meat, perhaps. Usually chicken. Sometimes codfish. Cooked bulgur wheat. Carrots or parsnips. If you’re lucky, there might be a cut of cheese wrapped up in cloth, ready to be sliced. It’s _supposed_ to be a silent affair, which he thinks would vastly improve the meal. But no, despite the intention of their founder, who had stipulated that meals be conducted without talking, it is like sitting with clowns. Men will always, like water, like weeds, find a way around something. So the monks started with sign language, they had started with whistling. Severus sits in a dour corner of a long table in the refectory, pushing a piece of pike around on his plate. He can feel the weight of the watchful stare on him from across the room. He doesn’t look up; he knows who it is.

His misery, his embarrassment sits in him like a heavy weight. He cannot think about anything else, it presses on his temples. It builds a headache behind his eyes. He is tired. _Please, God. Have mercy._

 

* * *

 

“Did you like it?” Potter asks (those ridiculous bright eyes). Severus’ head is bent over copying a small Gospel-book, drawing the initials large and in carmine ink. Potter sits at the adjacent desk making notes on the collection, what has been given and by whom. Where it has been lent. Books flow like a river, to and fro. Most of the acquisitions of Glastonbury, like all monasteries, come from a mixture of gifts and replication. Kings commonly donate books to help their standing with God. Otherwise, it was a constant stream of lending between the libraries. They go across huge distances. Once the borrowed texts are received, it is not merely the case to read them. Instead they are opened up and pale parchment lain beside, the inkwells uncapped. They set work to produce their own copy of the text, to preserve it across both distance and time. Eventually they send the original back, keep the new copy. It’s a remarkable amount of work and Severus is down by seven monks, all of them sick or dead by plague. Despite his pride, having Potter around is helpful. He could not complete the work without the boy.

“What?”  
  
“Cokeworth,”

“Does anyone like where they’re from?” How could anyone like Cokeworth? It stinks of coal and fish. It is cold there in a grinding sort of way. He can never bring the warmth into his bones. He looks at Potter, “Did you like Norfolk?”

“I’m not from Norfolk,” Potter says very quietly.

“You didn’t grow up with your uncle there?”

“I did,” the boy says, his mouth in a grim line, “I am not from there.” He pauses, looks to the west. “My father is from Godric’s Hollow, in Cornwall.”  

Severus nods, he swallows. The youth does have the hallmarks of the West Country. Pale skin, treebranch hair, eyes of rosemary, eyes of pennyroyal. And more still, a strangeness that speaks of dead kings that will return. The promise of rebirth. Old Celtic rhythms. He feels Glastonbury loom larger, perched here on this tor, this place that might be Avalon. _Annwn_ , the alien Welsh underworld, is close here. The old gods are born into Potter, he carries their very myths in his DNA. (Severus feels dirty and common in comparison. He tightens his hands into a fist to hide his bitten fingernails.)

 

* * *

 

 

It starts in the legs, at the groin.

“Severus,” Albus says, his eyes strangely bright and glassy. His stomach clenches, he knows what the abbot is about to say before the man opens his mouth, before he forms the words. _No. Not you._

 _And I looked and behold a pale horse._ Surely this is the Apocalypse? The end of the world. He expects Christ now, anyday. It is a quick onset. The fever had already set in. The chills wrack the frail body, tossing the blankets to the floor with their vibrations. The lymph nodes, the buboes, grow large like vile peaches. Dark and evil with blood, as tender to the touch as overripe fruit. They are close to draining, splitting just with a light touch.

The smell is foul when they burst, spewing forth pus, draining blood. It is a sick sweet and cloying. It gets stuck in his nosehairs, it hangs around for hours. The pain comes in waves, the vomiting, the blood (again, always the blood, that harbinger of the grave) filling the lungs. The sick cannot breathe, their mouths open and grasping at the air like drowning men. They have no space in their vile lungs for air. He grits his teeth. How do you fight a war against an invisible enemy?

“Severus,” Albus says, his voice straining to form the syllables. “You have hemlock. Bring it to me.”

“No,” he says. Ice cold. He closes his eyes, presses his fingers into his cheek, rubs at the heavy bags under his eyes. _No, you cannot ask this of me._

“Please, Severus,” he says, there is real fear there, “I have seen the suffering. _Promise_ me.” Albus lays there. He shivers, Severus does not recognize him. He does not recognize the eyes, pale blue and weak. The abbot is wracked with pain, with convulsions, with nausea that splashes back into his own face. The buboes are painful and heavy, thick with blood. Severus can see them there, below his shirt, straining at the seams. He knows that if they are drained, recovery is possible. If they are drained, infection is possible. Long strands of white hair lay unmoving on his pillow.

“You cannot ask that of me.”

“I understand,” he lies back on the bed, exhaustion painting his eyelids shut. “It’s alright, Severus. Send in Potter when you leave,” the abbot whispers.

 _How can I let him suffer? Who else can do it?_ He imagines Potter, young, bearing the sun in his face, putting the poison into the abbot’s tea. _I cannot let him._ (This is when he learns that monsters are sometimes necessary; sometimes monsters bear the kindnesses others cannot.)

There are many false friends in the natural world. There are almonds, _Prunis dulcis_ , which are the central ingredient in cyanide. Sweet almonds do not contain enough of the toxin to kill a man. Bitter almonds look nearly identical. Inside them lurks hydrocyanic acid, which preys on the respiratory system, losing a man in dizziness and vertigo. Your throat constricts, your lungs swell. You cannot breathe despite being surrounded by a wealth of oxygen, spoon-fed air. Air, air everywhere; and nary a breath to take. He could choose cyanide, distilled from almonds.

Hemlock is the other choice, _Conium maculatum_ , vicious and beautiful and deadly. A cousin of the carrot and native to Europe and North Africa. He knows hemlock by the smooth and hollow stem, streaked with red or purple like a sepsis infection. Fresh hemlock is the most dangerous. It flourishes in the spring, proliferating its poison like a weed. It is dangerous to all. It acts directly on the central nervous system, collapsing the respiratory system, destroying the kidneys. Then comes respiratory paralysis, the gasping for breath (it never comes). Asphyxiation sets in and with it, death. Severus appreciates the poetry of hemlock. The Greeks had used it to murder their condemned prisoners. Had administered it, one hundred milligrams, the fatal dose, to Theramenes and Phocion. Had accused Socrates himself of impiety, of corrupting the youth, dropped it into his drink. Socrates had gone willingly to the grave. (Severus is impious, he wants things, wants to corrupt young men. One young man. Perhaps he himself should drink the foul tea.)

Later, much later, in the dark after the compline prayer, he goes down the back steps, brings the hemlock steeped into boiled water. He stares off into it, thinking of dashing the entire cup on the ground. This is the only thing Albus has ever really asked of him. This is the only kindness he can offer. (Severus learns then about how monsters are made. He waits for Heracles to come, the hero in someone else’s story, and cut him down. Severus is a hero in no one’s story, even his own.) Albus does not stir when he sets the cup down. For an instant, Severus thinks he is dead already, his face like a living skull, mouth parted and hoping for breath. The miserable, fever-drenched abbot moans at the slight sound of his arrival. “I have brought you tea,” he says quietly. Albus says nothing, his eyes fuzzy and unfocused, his only sound is the sound of wretched, black misery. Severus props the body up against him, parts the old man’s lips with the edge of the porcelain cup, who drinks at it like nectar. He knows he will catch the illness like this, touching the dead. Albus has never asked anything else.

_Potter, you will never know the things I have done for you._

 

* * *

 

“Well?” he does not look up from the manuscript. His hands are dismally stained with charcoal-colored ink. It covers the side of his right palm, it smears onto everything he touches. He is grateful, once in awhile, for the miserable blackness of his tunic. (He is always so dirty, he does not understand how other people keep their hands clean.)

“The abbot has passed,” the stout cellarer says, “just now. May God have mercy on his soul.” He closes his eyes. _Maybe it’s easier this way._ His eyes stay curiously dry. The vein at his neck pulses. He can feel it strangely throbbing. “Come when you can,” Horace says, in that odd, understanding manner. Severus swallows, nods once. There is a long beat of silence after the man goes.

He is _furious._ He throws a pot against a wall, watching it shatter into clay dust. _Albus, I hate you, what have you done to me, where have you gone, how could you fucking do this?_ He is rudderless. The old abbot had always seemed so in control, so mysteriously wise. Severus may have been steeped in doubt but he had never realized how much _faith_ he had put into the abbot. In the end, he had always expected that someone was guiding the ship. He’d thought the abbot had had the wheel in hand. Now, he realizes there is nothing. He looks at the sky, at the empty throne of God. He is utterly devastated and alone on a cold rock. There is _nothing_. There is nowhere. There is no one.

Grief, he finds, is a measure of after. It fills the spaces where the silence looms, long after the deathrattle of the infected have ceased. He does not ask for any of the abbot’s things but his prayer book, the Book of Hours. The piece, illuminated and rich, deckled with gold, fits the stature of an abbot of Glastonbury Abbey. He remembers the old man’s quiet voice rising out above the din of men in singing psalms, lifting above past the stratosphere, reaching with long outstretched hands to God. (He vomits into his chamberpot, sick with soreness, sick with memory, sick with grief.)

Albus, who had taken him from his father’s home. Who had taken the illiterate soot-stained urchin, smelling of goats and sheep, and taught him how to read and write in Latin, in English, in French. Severus would be nothing without the abbot. _Nothing._ Cast back, back to Spinner’s End. That desolate little hovel of a cruck-built three-room house in Cokeworth. The thatched roof, the lime-ash floor. His mother had left crocks half-full with water on the table, filled with wildflowers. There is fennel and thistle, red campion and poppies. Sometimes, the table is covered with these flowers, covered in vases. There is nowhere to sit and eat.

He had always been a precocious child. Slipping downstairs amidst the adults sipping from big bottles of bitter grain-boiled ale, he had sidled between their legs like a puppy. He had ached for attention and conversation. _Talk to me. Tell me things. Stories._ He wanted to be their equal; he scorned children his own age. Age seven, dressed all in black with his mother’s dark cloak wrapped around his neck, peering anxiously at his reflection in the window, studying the irritating childishness of his face. He was a strange child. He slips his feet into his father’s big brown boots, carries a stick like a wool shear. “Stop it, you’re being childish,” his mother admonishes. He puts the boots away, the stick away, redfaced and humiliated. (Is this it? Is this how Geryon had felt when the wings had itched, started to poke out of his back? It was so awful, so distracting. Geryon had rubbed his back against every tree and stump he could find, desperate for relief. The other children had seen the little red wings poking out of the skin, these obvious markers of otherness, of inhumanity, of monster. _Get away from us, Geryon,_ they had called. _But I have done nothing wrong,_ he thinks. _Why can’t I stay?_ )

“The prayer book is the property of the abbey, it is sacred, it is _priceless,_ ” Thomas, that old vile snake, hisses. Severus stares at him in loathing. He can smell the ambition in the other man, who had never given a damn for the abbey, for God, for the abbot (God rest his soul). Thomas repulses him, his skin crawls like it is covered with insects, with roaches and lampyrid beetles.

Severus scowls, says nothing (he is so tired).

 

* * *

 

 

“I have something for you,” Severus turns and lifts his chin at the voice, unsure if he is talking to Potter or the novice monk right now. Potter shifts slightly, moving his weight from one hip to another. The other man’s eyes are so dark and flat, his voice expressionless as a Mother Superior.

“What?” He chokes out, voice ground against the dirt. Potter fumbles in his satchel.

_Don’t. Not now, don’t start._

He has a sick need for it to come from Potter and be to him. Not something for the abbey. Not from a young novice to a (perhaps) respected elder monk. No, he wants Potter to reach out, human to human. He needs to be needed and necessary. Suddenly he needs to know. _It doesn’t matter. It isn’t you. What are the odds, you vile thing, that he would prefer men, prefer you of all men? You could be his pathetic father. You would corrupt him. Taint him. He is so much more. He is the sun. You are a half-empty cup of bitterness. No, it doesn’t matter._ His head is a cacophony, there is so much. There is always too much.

Potter hands him a small, gilt-edged prayer book. It is uncomfortably familiar. (He is dangerously near crying or screaming, he is not sure which is about to come out of his mouth.)

“How?” he chokes. _I am foolish, how I am. You have no idea._ “How did you get this?” It’s so much more. Severus wants to keep Potter and the monastery, keep Potter apart from all imperfect things. The prayer book is cool and heavy to the touch, he cannot look at it without the bittersweet memories of the old man. _I did not want you involved._ Now he cannot look at the prayer book without thinking of Potter, who asks nothing of him. Potter, of Anglia, near to Avalon. (Severus is used to ulterior motives. He did not see the gentleness at first. He sees it in Potter now.)

 _Fuck._ He is furious, his fingers itch to choke the man. He can see it, his hands have always been deft, always strong. He knows how to kill an animal, he could press on the man’s windpipe, crush the access to air. Potter would turn purple first, then blue. His eyes would go bloodshot with the strain. It would not take long, a matter of minutes, really. _I will overturn your tables like in Jerusalem._ “Why?” he asks, when the visions run dry and he finds himself there, several long minutes later, staring at the prayer book and turning it over and over again in the silence.

“I like you,” the boy says. There is nothing innocent about the way it drops from his tongue. _Oh. Oh, hell. Why are you doing this to me?_ Severus stares, eyes like pits, he cannot breathe.

“You utter imbecile,” he hisses, “You absolute _fool._ I could ruin you, you could be expelled for this. Cast out. You could be _killed_ if you are not careful. Do you have any goddamn common sense at _all_ ? Do you know what I could do to you? I am not a good man, Potter,” _You fucking cretin, you cannot, cannot say these things. Not out loud, not where someone could hear you._

“I know that.” Severus looks up surprised. He does not have an answer to that simple statement. He looks at his hands. They are pale and lined. They hold nothing (there is nothing to hold). _Is it in me already?_ He thinks of the start of the sickness. The glassy eyes, the malaise. The swelling like mountains below the skin. His fingers graze over his neck, his groin, his armpits. He is not sure what should be there (worse, he is not sure what should _not._ ) His skin holds suspicion.

“Get out,” he whispers. Potter nods, ever sad-eyed (color of seaweed which wraps around his feet, which drowns all men), picks up the satchel.

_We exist, you and I, in a world lit only by fire._


	7. Vespers

_“You might be surprised to hear that illness  
_ _occurs on Andromeda. That the field  
_ _of medicine is still a necessary patch of land.  
_ _Did you think I was telling you a fairy tale,  
_ _Cal? Trying to get some religious parables  
_ _into your already impassioned childhood  
_ _and indoctrinate you toward the obligations  
_ _of heaven? I am not. People still get sick  
_ _in Andromeda, and woe and death_

  _and grief arrive each day like packets  
_ _of mail through a slot in the door.  
_ _How could it be otherwise? It is life,_

  _after all. And despite what the religious  
_ _on Earth try to prove, no one can choose  
_ _life. We can only choose choices.”_  
Brenda Shaughnessy, Our Andromeda

 _“Then Geryon rested his neck to one side  
_ _As might a poppy when it mars  
_ _The tenderness of its body shedding  
_ _Suddenly all of its petals.”_  
Stesichorus, Geryoneis

  


_Shall I tell you, instead, of the past?_

(Once upon a time, there were titans and nephilim. This was before they were called monsters. Before monsters were invented, before Heracles looked into Geryon’s face. Geryon had paused there, hopeful. Maybe he’d be invited along, he was so hopeful. Heracles was so beautiful. The young hero had shrugged his shoulders with his unfair, effortless beauty, had said _“God, Geryon, you’re ugly,”_ had shot him right in the face with a goddamn arrow dipped in hydra blood. There was a moment where Geryon too might have been a hero.)

Once, he was twenty years old. _Youth is dangerous_ , he thinks, all that energy, that conviction (none of the grey). He had killed a man who had dared spit on him, call him _soft,_ call him _sodomite._

“My son,” Albus had said after, _I will bring you out of Egypt. “_ Come with me.” He had nodded, face bloodied, lip split (heartaching). He had not meant to kill the man. _Queer_ , the man had said, _sodomite._ Severus’ face still burns with the shame, with the hatred. (He had been as surprised as the other man had, as his dagger drove in slicing cell from cell. He had not meant to strike. He had not realized how easy it was to slice the femoral artery, that a man could bleed out in seconds, twitching as he goes, eyes deadening in hypovolemic shock. Dead then, dead as a doornail.)

The corpse had sat before him. Dead, eyes vacant. He had never seen the dead quite so _close_ before. It was always at a distance, a sickbed, a head on a pike. _This one is mine._ He’d felt the wetness on his eyelashes before he realized he was crying. _It was an accident; I didn’t mean to. Father, forgive me._

“Yes, Father.” Albus, who was friend, who was Father Abbot. The old man had taken him then from Cokeworth, had seen something in a bitter, violent twenty-year-old man with an overlarge nose and greasy, unwashed hair. _You will come and serve the Lord with me,_ Albus had said. And Severus had gone. Most peasants do not come unbound from the land they serve. You cannot expect much down in the gutter. Maybe a bit of rainwater if you’re lucky. Some spilled wine. You exist only to shear someone else’s sheep, harvest their grain, cut their wood. Your life, if you’re lucky, is nasty and brutish. If you’re lucky, it is short.

He had never cared about God (he is still not sure he believes); he had always believed in Albus. His chest is still. In death, he does not look restful, he does not look like he is sleeping. He looks waxy and strange. Severus shudders. (He thinks of his mother’s funeral. He had been brought to see her in death, his father’s hand clasped heavy on his shoulder. _This isn’t her, these are not her bones._ The figure looked like a queer, skinny imitation of her. He sags with relief. _It’s not her._ )

There will be no funeral for the old man. Outlawed by Clement, the French pope in the wake of all the dead. He is tempted, briefly, to toss the prayer book in the fire. What good is memory? (He sets the book down at his desk, he does not look again at the fire.) Albus is gone now. There are so many sick. Dozens of the clergy of the abbey lay ill, moaning on their beds.

_There’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance._

“Are you okay?”

“Why would I be okay, Potter?”

“I’m just asking,” the boy is quiet, thoughtful, “He meant a lot to me too, you know.” _I know. I spent longer with him. He was like a father to me. And I murdered him so you did not have to. You will never know that._ He glares, Potter doesn’t seem much to mind. “Do you want me to sit with you?”

“No,” he quirks a dark brow, “but I have the appalling idea that you will anyway.” That soft, private smile, a crackle to the sad eyes. Below their grief he can still see the impish creature, ever present and unbroken.

“Yeah,” Potter says, “I want to. And because I don’t think you mind me as much as you pretend.”

_Impertinent fool._

 

* * *

 

They bring the abbot’s body down to the ossuary while they consider it. The bone house. He hates this horrible room, this creeping necropolis. The Zoroastrians had used wells for their bones, for their saints. Had called them _astudan_ , the place for the bones. He wonders how many men can die before a graveyard is full, before the ossuaries fill up. They’re running out of earth. They can use the bones themselves to build another church.

“What do we do?”

“Bring up the bodies,” he says, “All of them. Burn them.”

“God must forgive us,” Thomas whispers. (Severus has always hated Thomas Riddle, the Sacrist, who minds the gold, the jewels, sitting on them like a dragon with his hoard.) _Fuck you,_ he thinks. He knows Thomas thinks only of the vacant abbot’s seat. “This is sacrilege. The archbishop will _ruin_ us.”

“The archbishop won’t give a damn. Canterbury’s got their own sick to worry about.” The plague travels everywhere, knocks on all doors, overturns all stones. (They do not know then, as they speak, that the Archbishop of Canterbury, John de Stratford, lies dying of sick in his own bed. His successor, John de Ufford, would be appointed in December by papal bull. The plague would get greedy and take him too, claiming the new Archbishop in the following spring. The disease ignores no man.)

“No,” Potter is furious. Severus can read it in the tension of his back, rigid as a divining rod. “Severus is right.” Thomas glares at the both of them. The others nod. Horace and Hagrid have seen the horrors with their own eyes. They do not disagree, he can see it in the set of their jaws. These are desperate times.

“Westchester burnt their dead. They have less sick now. I don’t know how they relate but they do, Thomas.” He closes his eyes, heavy. “Burn him. Quickly.”

They burn the bodies in the way of the ancient Greeks. Pyre comes from πυρά, _pyrá,_ related to fire. Many had burned their dead before but the Greeks had elevated it, had given it a name. The Romans had also carried out the practice, even up here when they had claimed English land. Select the wood, make sure it is dry and will catch and burn hotly. It cannot go out too quickly. The body is then placed either above or under and set ablaze until reduced to nothing but ash and bone fragments. Hagrid, built like a giant, stocky and tall, has the unfortunate task of loading the corpses on the woodpile. The smell of burnt flesh and hair is never unlearnt once you know it. It sticks in his own hair, in his eyelashes, gets under his fingernails. He scrubs at it with lye soap, trying to rub it raw from his own skin. It doesn’t yield.

“Take this then,” Thomas says, “if you must.” Severus takes the proffered item, the sick reliquary housing the abbot’s ashes, carved in animal bone. It is decorated too richly, he thinks, painted with ochre and ash, with copper gilt, inlaid with sycamore. Albus, Father Abbot, had never been given to indulgence. Severus would have preferred something simpler, more chaste. (Thomas had selected it. Fuck, how he loathes the man.) His fingers grip at it tightly, curving around the carved bone, feeling it cut into his skin.

_Shut up, you repellent wretch._

 

* * *

 

 

“What are you doing here?” he hisses. There is panic in his lungs. This cannot be found out. Young monks do not go in the private rooms of older men.

“No one saw me,” Potter says, his hand running through his coal-black hair. (Severus watches the lamplight on the planes of his face.)  
  
“That’s not what I asked,” he spits.

“Severus -”  
  
“Why are you _here,_ Potter?” he rasps, his pathetic voice drawn and quartered, “with me?” He feels so tight, so claustrophobic. He cannot breathe, his breath comes quickly and harshly, desperate for oxygen. He thinks of Heracles who came to kill Geryon. Geryon, who had done _nothing_ wrong save but dare to be ugly as sin in a world where men like Heracles walk. He’d done nothing but dare to keep his beautiful cattle, to stake out his little spot in Erytheia. Keep a dog maybe. After the slaughter, the beautiful are always heroes, the ugly always monsters. _I haven’t done anything wrong, why are you here?_

_You will destroy me._

Harry stands. His habit is plain, open at the neck. Severus can see no mocking in the seaglass eyes, wide and open, ringed with insect leg eyelashes. He spreads his hands wide, to Severus, to the sky. “I want you,” he says. It is so simple after all.

“Leave, _child_ ,” he turns, running his tongue over the rough skin from where he has torn his bottom lip to shreds. It is probably bleeding. He is sick, miserable, so _irritated._  He cannot stand this. (He aches and wants so much for things he _cannot have_.)

“Just _please_ ,” he hears the voice behind him. Unsteady, uncertain. “I don’t know where this is going. I don’t know if we’re gonna live another week. A month. A _year_ , even. Let us have this, _please_.” Pale, long hands with blunt, square fingers wrap over his arm. (It is the second time he has been touched; he has already given in.) This boy, this young man, his hair the color of iron-gall ink, the color of the spaces between books, the smudges on his hands. He does not understand how they got here, unseen into Severus’ cell. He thanks God (the Christian one, then to cover his bases, all of them in the Celtic and the Roman pantheon), for the foresight to give him a private room. Harry presses his mouth in the soft spot behind Severus’ ear. The hot, wet air flicks at his skin, electricity races from the crown of his skull down, deep below his waist.

“What do you want?” _What will you take from me? How much do I need to give?_ Harry pauses, his hands gripping Severus’ shoulders, “I want to know what _you_ want.” His black hair in his eyes, brushing Severus’ own sweat-dipped locks away, “I want that.”

How - How does a man expect that? Severus always _wants_ so much, so he always takes what he is given, has learned to ignore his own wants, to give over to others (no one has ever asked what Severus wanted). What does he want? He does not know where to start. He runs his hands, his eyes, over Harry with reverence. There are many things Severus hates. He is quick to temper, quick to self-loathing, yet nothing, _nothing_ will ever make him believe that touching the youth, making love to him, is anything other than an act of worship.

_What do I want? I do not know where to stop. Once it gets going, the want never ceases. Where would you like to start? On your knees (on mine)? On your back, your stomach? Over me? Under? Within and without? I have never been touched in love. Been spoken to in the act of love. I want you to get my ink set, go fetch it now from the scriptorium. (It is late, it is empty, there is no one there.) Dip the quill in to the eel-dark ink. I want you to write your name on my back. Tell me things in my skin, between my ribs. Tell me you love me. I want you to ruin me (you already have)._

_Wait, go further. Get a knife. Can you peel away my skin, just there? I want you to see my bones, my ribs, the only thing that will last after me. Carve your name into my skeleton, right here, the fourth true rib. Costae verae. When the archaeologists come a thousand years later, I want them to crack open my thoracic cage, read the words. “Here lies Severus Snape. Harry Potter loved him once.”_

_I want you to etch a mark into my skin each time we make love. I do not want to be able to look at myself and forget a single moment when you touched me._

_Are these wrong? Should I stop?_

“You’re thinking too much,” Harry breathes. When had the boy gotten in front of him? When had those eyes (green as lacewings) gotten so close to his own? They are scarce centimeters apart. Harry licks his lips (miserably bitten, chapped, split) and Severus repeats the motion as if under witchcraft. (Geryon watches Heracles, who has come late in the night. He is confused when Heracles drops the sword, surges forward, pressing his lips to Geryon’s. _I want you,_ Heracles breathes. _But I’m a monster,_ Geryon says, his fingers in the flesh, gripping. _Everyone’s a monster._ )

 _You taste like benediction._ His head is pushed back by Harry’s enthusiasm. He wants to watch, he never wants to look away but the boy is too blinding in his filthy radiance. Too much. Too much gold in him, in his mouth. Too much red in his lips, his cheeks. Severus keens as Harry’s tongue lashes at his own. He can feel the tastebuds like goosebumps in the boy’s wet, hot mouth, the smoothness of his skin. Harry tastes salty, like earth, the sea, the body of Christ. Severus is _pulling_ at him, desperate to wrench the boy closer, to pull him into himself. _I need you. God, I need you._ Bombs detonate behind his eyelids, sparking from the crown of his head, racing along the vagus nerve down his spine. He is sweating. He is hot, he is cold. He is delirious (he is terrified). _I need you. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck._ It is a vile thing to be reduced to need.

Those eyes (green as mold, green as putrefaction). Eyes like supernovas, the birth and death of stars.

(He thinks then that not all monsters are bad. Plato had talked of the children of the sun, who wore two faces and walked on four legs. Who had been whole, who had been perfection, who had been split down the middle into two men by jealous lightning. Man is the twisted wreckage, the monster. Not the four armed. No, those creatures had never known love. They had never needed to; they had had no missing parts.)

His hand works, parting the boy’s clothing like the sea. He should feel ashamed, the rotten, vulgar way he wants Harry. _I need to fuck you._ Take the novice, peel away his black robes. He spits in his palm, wraps it around the cock pushing into his thigh. Hard as granite, ice, obsidian, cherry wood. Hot as stars. Hot as an open flame. The skin shifts under his grip, the bitter and violent smell of salt washes over him. Salt and sweat and bitter, heavy pre-come. Transparent slick pours from the tip, his rough thumb rubs it around. Harry moans. Maybe he does too, he isn’t sure of what sounds are his and which are Harry’s. _I need you, oh fuck, I need you._ Harry’s hands claw at him, unsure of where to settle. They clutch at his tunic, burrow in the dark wool. They wrench at his neck, his face, his hair. Pull at him, enough to hurt, just like that. Harry sucks a hot supplication into Severus’ neck, at the join of throat and trapezius. _Oh._ Rutting, rutting like wild animals under a starry sky. _Fuck._ Harry bites and _squeezes,_ his eyes shut so tightly, as he paints Severus’ tunic with white, gasping, gasping. _Oh my god._ He wants to pray. _What if I lick it off? Taste you? Would you taste like the earth? Like the sea?_ (He has only ever tasted himself, in moments of desperate curiosity.) He stutters into his orgasm, swelling with whiteness and music and stars.

There is time enough to catch their breath. He eases back from Harry, chest heaving. They suck at the oxygen in the air like greedy misers. Harry’s face is too close, his eyes are too close. Severus shuts his eyes. _Please, please, I need a moment. Let me float here bonelessly until the end of time._

_Let me touch you. I want to know you without needing to see you. Humans do not have a wide hearing range, not compared to most other creatures. The human ear is sensitive from zero to eighty-five decibels, beyond that can shake the fluid of the inner ear, blow out the drum. I don’t need to hear you to know that you are screaming, I can feel that in the tension of your muscles. I can know your screams with my hands. I need sound instead for discerning the quiet. The moments here in bed when you do not move, when the only things are the soft passing of your breath, the low-pitched whisper of holy holy holy._

“I like your nose,” Harry says, touching his finger to the bridge. Severus stares, disbelief in his slack mouth.

“You have got to be joking.”

“No,” the younger man says, “it’s kinda...I don’t know, dignified?”

“The snout of a greasy old bat, more like.” Harry grins as he hears the old rumor.

“A very attractive greasy old bat,” he says, “You’re not so bad, you know, warts and all.” Severus spikes one eyebrow high into his hairline.

“I regret everything about inviting you here," he mutters. There is no malice in it. “You should wash yourself from the bowl before going,” he says, studying the other man with his watchful blacktar eyes, “You reek of me.”

“No,” Harry says, “I want to.” Severus doesn’t understand, he is at sea. Waves of warmth wash over him, his stomach clenches. Where his fingers have trailed over the young man’s skin, Harry smells of the crow-eyed monk. Anointed by his sandalwood incense and myrrh, by dry, tannic red wine, by the orange, the cinnamon, and clove of his hair oil. There is no mistaking it, anyone near would immediately pass by and know that Harry is _marked_. By Severus. They would know, and Harry is okay with that. God in Heaven, rather, he _wants_ it.

“Everyone will know.”

“So let them know.” Harry’s fingers trace circles on Severus’ hand, his codfish skin. “I want them to know,” he says quietly, “I want everyone to come close and immediately know I belong to you.” He looks up, grasseyed, and continues quietly, “And I want them to smell me on you.” There is a flush on his face, “I don’t want to share.”

He is terrified. He wants to keep, to push away. _Stay,_ he thinks. _Get the hell out of here,_ he thinks. He wants to pick Harry up like a stone, carry him like a talisman in a pocket. He wants to leave, shut the door in the youth’s face, never return. He fantasizes briefly of what the boy would do, would think if Severus left. He fantasizes about the pain he would leave if he were gone, never to return. A daydream of the weight of his own spaces. _I love you._ It weighs so much, like he’s swallowed too much. Taken a bite of something far too hot. He is aching, burning. Spit it out. Swallow it down. Severus realizes he has never been in love before. Love leaves traces and scars. He knows he will not come away from this unscathed. He is petrified. _What will happen to us? What about - after?_ (He is not allowed to ask. He will take what he is given.) “Harry,” he had not meant to sound pleading (he does, he is), “we cannot.”

“I know,” Harry says, “I just _want._ ”

Severus understands (he is always sick with want). He thinks of the books he’s read, the hidden ones that no one speaks of. What about the Greeks, two-thousand years ago? There had been no shame then in two men fumbling together. This would have been as common as a piss-scented tavern, common as a pigeon, as a flea-infested rat. The Greeks did not separate love that way. Their shames were different, there would always be shame, that is the human condition. But there, in Sparta so many lifetimes ago, he could have taken the boy’s hand, eramenos to erastes, traded his wisdom and connections for beauty and vibrancy. (There were things that would not have been allowed. It could not have continued into the boy’s later age. The older man could never be passive, could never lay in the grass, spit-roasted by a hot cock driven into him from a beautiful hero. No, but he would take what he can get. These were details that could be worked out.)

 

* * *

 

 

“Don’t,” comes the voice through the door. Lead sits in Severus’ belly. He swallows. Fear sticks in his throat like a pill.

“What? Whyever not?”

“You - you can’t.” Dread pools in him, “There is - there’s a swelling.”

 _Fuck._ “Where?”

“My neck.”

He rests his forehead on the woodgrain of the door, “I will get the infirmarian.”  How could the world get it wrong? He is the old monster, he is supposed to be slain so the hero might triumph. (In no world is Potter not a hero.)

“Snape -”

“ _What_ , Potter?”

He hears nothing.

 

* * *

 

 

“Is it -” he asks. He doesn’t need to finish the sentence. The look on the infirmarian’s face is grim.

“Yes, Severus.” _Fuck._ “Shall we get the doctors?”

“What the devil is the point?” He mutters, “Just say the rites instead.” _I stay down with my demons._ His hands grip the chair, the wood nearly breaks. (Severus is a sinner; Death comes for him. Severus waits. It may as well hurry up. He hates waiting.)

The doctors come. Severus _hates_ them, his lip curls when he sees them in their black robes, their birdmask faces. He loathes the sight of them, these failed physicians. Their beaklike masks (like vultures, like crows) bear no hope. They are the men who shepherd the dead to their graves. They come like Death himself, indiscriminately to doors darkened by the awful illness. Their masks stuffed with aromatics. Juniper, ambergris, camphor, clove. They do not come bearing cures but instead they mark the dead in books. They tally up (into the thousands, the millions) the grinning skulls they find, dead in their beds.

(He thinks of the uncharitableness of lovers. Lovers leave, they die. They are mortal, can be felled with an arrow, with a virus. They can separate, willingly or otherwise. He thinks of Heloise and Abelard, wrenched apart to give honor to the Lord. _I love you, I hate you._ )

The dying fight less than he had imagined. They close their eyes (they are shivering, they are so tired); he knows they have given up the fight. (He says he does not blame them. He lies.) It’s strange, waiting for someone else’s death. He is exhausted, he wants it to get on with it. There’s no fighting it anyway. He does not know if death is enough. (In Heaven, there is still memory. He does not want to remember.)   _All of me is a part of you now. All of me is joined to you. If you leave - fuck, if you leave. I will be a half-man._ He has not left the side of the novice, he is terrified that if he does, the boy will breathe his last. That he might choke on his own vomit. If he can just stay, if he can just do exactly the same thing each moment, then maybe Potter will creep through. Maybe, just maybe, he will survive.

The desperation is a thirst. He _needs_. Fuck, he needs so much. To be touched, to be absolved. _I do not love you except because I love you._ (He loves the young novice. It is true, it is awful. It cannot be said, it cannot be tolerated.) He has been touched by the man. _I should never have let you._ He looks at his hands, which have lain on Harry’s skin. _I wish you had been fire and burnt me where I touched you. Left scars. I don’t want to forget. It is so hard not to say things to you. I am in the gardens with a beautiful boy, trying not to tell him I love him._ (Harry, do not go gentle. Rage, rage, rage against the dying of the light.)

“Go to prayer, Severus,” Horace says. Ruddy-cheeked, gentle-voiced, smiling that old indulgent smile. Horace has always been kind to Severus (though he thinks the man’s a bit of a fool). He ignores the old cellarer, “Pray to the Lord. It’s all we can do.” (When Severus finally goes to the Vespers prayer, he does not pray. He does not lift his voice in the song of psalms. He has nothing to offer, nothing to give.)

In the nave, five or six monks sit quietly, scattered amongst the pews, their heads bowed in prayer. He has so much envy. He is sick with it. It climbs up the back of his throat. He looks around at his companions. _Make up your damn mind, are you in or out?_ It would be better if he could settle into either belief or atheism. Both go on faith, either in God or the absence of God. Severus is uneasy, he is so weak, he cannot make up his mind. He clings to the word _if_. _If God is real. If He exists. If I make it._ (He hates the young men, the postulates and the novices, who come to the abbey with wide, trusting eyes.)

 

* * *

 

 _Don’t._ He squeezes his eyes shut, breathes in deeply. The air is stifling with sick and stillness. _Don’t you dare fucking die on me, you godforsaken brat. Do you have any idea?_ He does not know if there are eyes set in the walls. He should not. (It is nearly over now, he is not sure it matters anymore.) _Goddammit, Potter._ He reaches for the loose wrist. His fingers curl around Harry’s hand, he rests his forehead against the slack knuckles. Is the boy terrified? Had he been? He is weak and delirious, moaning at ghosts in the walls. Severus wonders how it feels to touch the swelling, to feel the bubo pulsating there under the skin. He wonders what it is to carry death within your body. He pulls the black wool tighter around him although he is not cold. His long, black-haired fingers clench at the fabric, whiteknuckled. He watches the buboes spread over the boy’s skin, malicious in their subcutaneous hemorrhaging, the dusky bruises settling like shadows across the flesh. _If,_ (he clings to if), _if he makes it, I will do anything. I will go on pilgrimage. I will go to Jerusalem. I will believe._

The dead pile up, in the abbey and the nearby village. They, the living, can hardly keep up with burying them. Sometimes they lay in piles, stacked like cut wood. The bodies, already horrifying, break down in stages. They start with autolysis and putrefaction, the body’s own chemicals and enzymes gnawing away at tissues. Bacteria get in on the feast, letting out the malodors of cadaverine and putrescine, the unmistakable scent of death and decay. The corpses bloat with death gas, scavengers nudge at the bones and the wretched cornucopia of rotten intestines. Carrion beetles and mites settle, blow flies, bottle flies (green like his eyes). The rats never leave, they are everywhere. It is not a shock to see a corpse in a street, a dismembered arm in some lazy alley, carried and dropped by some unlucky animal. A dog perhaps, a fox.

He thinks of his mother. The famine had curled its skinny fingers over them in 1315, narrowing waists and drying mouths. After, after the silence had come, he had walked up to the wall and punched it. The skin broke at his knuckles, split like a ripe peach, pomegranate blood dripping from the ragged holes in his skin. Good, there should be holes. Holes like the puncture in his heart. His mother, he wears her black eyes and black hair proudly. Their crooked noses, imported from the east _. Severus Snape, the Wallachian,_ through his mother’s veins, which he shared. There are so many sins that bubble up within him, pride is never the least of them. He dreams sometimes of leaving this place. These old scars. Go east, to the Carpathians. He pictures them, beautiful and bright against the icy sky.

“Don’t you fucking dare, Potter,” he whispers. Spit flecks out from his lips, catches on his unshaven beard. He unconsciously squeezes the lax hand within his own. What sort of leverage does he have with God? Not much. He looks elsewhere but everything is a bleak nothingness. All that’s left are words he cannot say, words he has never said to another living person. (Potter is barely living, he can say these things now.) _I love you, you brat.  You spoilt fool. I wish you’d never come into my life. You cannot leave. Not now. I don’t know what to do with you. Tell me, tell me what to do. Who do I have to talk to? Let me bail you out. I can go in your stead. It won’t matter if I’m dead (will you mind as much?). Is that selfish of me? It was alright before, to live in a world without knowledge of you. I cannot bear a world in which I remember you and you are not there. Don’t you dare, Potter, you godforsaken bastard, don’t you dare leave me here._ He grits his teeth. The molars might crack. He borrows words from other mens’ mouths (he cannot bear his own). “Quos amor verus tenuit, tenebit,” murmured softly into the quiet between dust and shadow. _True love will hold on to whom it has held._ Seneca, that old orator, had known a thing or two. _I love you, I love you, I love you._

 _I have never loved before_ , he might say. (That is a bald lie. He falls in love easily and with everything. With a storm swell, with a quill, with old stone walls. With a book, with a pigment. With the smell of smoke and cedar. He has never loved, though, quite like this before.)

_Since when do heroes die?_

(Water hemlock. _Cicuta maculata_. Dangerous, this toxic cousin of the shrub that felled Socrates. It is common in North America, where Severus does not know. The ever-mortal cicutoxin gathers in its roots, those traitorous cousins of parsnips. It is nearly always fatal to consume, your body wracked with convulsions, with nausea. Death comes then. If, if it does not. If you are one of the lucky ones, your brain fogs over, the connections fail, and amnesia sets in.)

 


	8. Compline

_“Omnia vincit amor, et nos cedamus amori.”_  
_(Love conquers all things, let us yield to love.)_  
Virgil

 _“Just a perfect day_  
_You made me forget myself_  
_I thought I was_  
_Someone else, someone good.”_  
Lou Reed, Perfect Day

 

It is strange sometimes, that with relief can come anger. “The fever’s broke,” Horace says. Severus doesn’t even look at the man. _Breathe in, Severus, breathe out.  One, two._

He doesn’t speak, he nods, gathers up his books, his notes. Outside the dormitory’s sickroom, he pauses. Breathe. Drop the shoulders. Relax. The fever has broken. He looks down the long hall, stone-walled and stone-floored. The tapestry opposite him, done in blues and silvers, of a fantastical beast with a mane-rimmed neck and a scaly backside, pointed dexter. Similar creatures have been seen in bestiaries, he has painted them, edged them in gold leaf. The tapestry is old, at least a hundred years or so, and the dyed wool and linen is faded. Where it is shot through with silver thread, it gleams in the candlelight.

He enters into the dorm, the single, solitary cell of misery and sick. Harry looks like a stain against the bed. He does not look alive. He groans slightly, Severus’ legs go weak. He does not know where the desire to crush the boy comes from, his hands betray him, twitching slightly at his sides. His distrustful hands touch the boy’s skin. It is cool now and soft. The sweat has dried. The heartbeat is _there_. Weak, yes, but it beats steady as a drum. (He could weep, will weep, does weep.) Harry looks at him through bent eyelashes, clammy with recovery.

“It was God’s will,” Harry murmurs, “He saved me.”

“Was it though?” he asks, voice low. He is ever drowning in doubt. Severus the Wallachian, Severus the Doubtful.

“Don’t say those things,” the young man says, drawing his hand across his damp face, “ _That_ is heresy.” So be it, then. Severus nods. He keeps his doubt to himself, neatly wrapped up and secreted away. Publicly, he gives thanks to the Lord. To Christ, who is mercy. Glory, glory, hallelujah. It is uncommon to recover from plague. Harry was young though, it did not like the young as much.

Harry. That blessed creature, alive and breathing. Harry with his weak smile, lain against the pallet. Unbleached wool is tucked under his head for comfort. Severus stands awkwardly at the side, unsure of what to say. He had had so much within him while the boy lay dying, desperate and aching. It is different now that there is time. How do you start with _after_? “Is there anything you require?” he asks.

Potter weakly shakes his head. No.

“I must attend the service,” Severus crosses his arms, uncrosses them. “I’ll come back after, when I can.”

“I know,” Harry says, voice like snowfall. “I know you will.” Severus stands, dark wool dropping to the stone floor.

“When you feel … recovered,” he whispers, electric, “come when you can.” _Come later, do not make me wait. I am not a patient man._ He tightens his fists, sucks in the cool air, and takes his leave. Horace meets him in the nave.

“He’s a tough lad,” the stout man says. Severus nods.

“Yes,” he murmurs, “he always survives.”

“The bishop will be here soon, I hear. We need to choose a new abbot,” Horace says. “I believe the odds-on favorite is you, Severus.” The mitre and crozier loom before him, heavy. He would like to protest but the only grounds are his own unsuitable, difficult nature. He is well over thirty, he has been a member of the abbey for twenty-one years, he was not, despite all his miserable efforts to the contrary, a bastard.

“A poor choice if I ever heard one,” he says, glaring.

“I don’t think so,” Horace smiles, kind in his own way. Severus frowns, ever dissatisfied.

Compline is the last prayer, the quietest of them all. After compline is silence until Vigils, until the cycle is renewed. Compline is his favorite prayer. It reminds him of winter. Of the quiet of snow, blanketing the earth. The quiet of emptiness, spaciousness, the in-betweenness of things. He thinks of a heartbeat, he knows that Compline is the moment in-between beats, that unsure quiet thing which might be death but also, maybe, might be renewal.

He bows his head. The statue of Christ on the crucifix looks on, over the pews of the faithful and doubtful. _I don’t know. I don’t know if you are there. I don’t know if God exists or if you were a real man and we’ve built this entire mess up around you. I don’t know if you are the son of God. But if. If you are. If you are then thank you for him. For his life. To Death who came and went away again. Thank you. Amen._

(He thinks of the night-blooming cereus, _Selenicereus grandiflorus._ The king of kings. It is swift and mercurial. It is difficult to bloom. If it does bloom at all, then it comes at night and for one night only. Sometimes pleasure is quick in the night, sometimes we take our relief where we can. When we can. This is the strength in us, in Severus Snape. To strike forward, looking for the next relief, trudging through the grey. Do not blink, do not look away. Something might bloom.)

 

* * *

 

_I need you. I need you to lie still. I am going to count you. There are two-hundred and six bones in your body, I want to make sure they are all accounted for. Your skull, your coccyx, your metatarsals. Do you have any idea how I love you? Like a fish loves the sea, that deep and unknowable nothingness. We have never seen the ocean floor, I do not know the depths of you. Mesmerizing, incomprehensible, deep. I thought you were dead, you are not. My heart is still working, so you must be alive. I will keep you safe, your bones safe. Gather up your ribs like a bouquet, scatter them to the wind._

“Find a way to come tonight,” he had whispered. It has been such a long, long time, he has needed so much. Needed to see the boy, to touch him. Harry. He knows that he will not believe in the novice’s recovery until he can feel the heartbeat safe in the palm of his hand. He paces his cell, anxiety soaking his neck. The world is a ruin. The dead outnumber the living. But there _are_ the living. It is a miserable triumph. Harry lives. He glances at the straw pallet. He should sleep (he cannot sleep, it has never come easy). Is the boy coming? Is he not?

There is a slight knock at the oak door. Harry slips in through a small crack in the door, trying to conceal the candlelight from spilling into the hall.

“Hello,” he says. Severus stares, consuming his features by sight with cave-dark eyes.

“Are you - are you alright?” _I thought you were dead._

“Feel a bit like I’ve gone ten rounds with a dragon,” Harry chuckles ruefully, he drags one long set of fingers through his treebranch hair. Severus drinks it in, the wide knuckles, the hair unruly as a rat’s nest. _Fuck, I want you._ “But I’ll survive.”

“Good,” he mutters. He crosses his arms, tight against his chest. There are approximately eight feet between them, chest to chest. It might as well be all of England.

“Er,” Harry says, shifting side to side, clearly discomfited by Severus’ forbidding posture. “I’m not sure how to do this.”

“Do what, Potter?” he snaps (why, he doesn’t know why). _What if I lose you?_ The young novice closes his eyes, Severus can watch the pupils dart from side to side beneath the skin.

“ _Stop it,_ ” Harry says, “Stop being a _bastard_ , you prick.”

“How dare you -” Severus flashes, Harry rolls his eyes, steps forward and shuts him up. _Miraculous._ How did he give in so quickly? The problem is that we are all two of us, the brain and the body. Sometimes it is the body that wins. His skin calls out, his hair calls out, his teeth call out. Harry’s mouth seals on his like a leech, sucking at him, cracking against his skin like a bonfire. His eyes close, roll back. There are stars there, entire universes. Bite there, at the lower lip, like it is a ripe plum. Ready to split, to be eaten and consumed. Lick the rich sweet juices up that fall down the throat. He attacks the stubble of the young man, his lips burning in friction. He licks at the soft skin of the eyelids, feels the moth-soft eyelashes against his hyper-sensitive lips, touches the end of the straight nose with his tongue. They back against the straw bed, the sparse pallet, fall into the deep.

“Can I touch you?” he whispers (he is not sure, he is afraid).

“Please,” the novice whispers, takes his hand and brings it down. _Please never stop. I will never stop. I will love you forever. Shepherd you forever. When you are dead, I will take your bones with me, tucked into a reliquary like a saint. I will watch your body for miracles, for you are made in God’s image. I am low, a sinner, you are made of ambrosia and nectar. You are Apollo. Ganymede. I need you._ His hands are gentle, they run over the young body like old parchment, over the abdominal obliques (he is terrified). His fingertips graze the gooseflesh skin, dimpled like a mountain range. How much can he take? He doesn’t want to hurt the boy, freshly recovered. The hellspot buboes are gone now but the murky bruises remain, a cacophony of olive green and wine purple. The spots where they had drained will scar, seem like battlewounds. Harry will be able to show these scars, there at the throat, below the jaw, in the future. He will be able to say _yes yes yes I have lived_. Severus touches these spots in a mixture of horror and devotion. _I will not abandon you again._ He wants to kiss the lesions. He does not, he wonders if it would seem too strange.

“You won’t hurt me,” Harry breathes, “you can be harder.”

He wants. (How can we communicate the measure of our want? How do you measure the unknown? Consider then the case of the black hole. We cannot see it, cannot comprehend it. It is the confusion at the center of galaxies where all matter is called home to roost. Perhaps he can measure the speed of the things that orbit him, the things he aches for. Once he knows the speed, he can apply the universal law of gravity to it, compute the difference. Numbers are elegant, they can measure the unknown.) He needs. He will perish with the misery of it. He would prefer to have nothing, so nothing can be taken from him.

“You will have to tell me,” he grits his teeth, he needs to know the measure of the thing. How hard is _too hard_ ? He knows he could consume the boy, grind up his flesh with his molars like Grendel to Heorot, spit out the bones. (If he does, if he swallows Harry’s flesh, it will be broken down in his stomach into the basic building blocks of life. Atoms, molecules, enzymes. He will take them, disassemble them like his countrymen have done to the old Roman ruins, and rebuild his own body from this feast. Harry would be his very skin then, a part of him always. He grimaces at the evil thoughts, they come to his mind unbidden. _Goddammit, I am a foul creature_.)

“I want you,” Harry breathes, his skin flushed. “I want you inside me.” _Fuck, fuck. Oh god_. Yes, that. He needs that, to be safe within the space of the man, to feel health surround him, life to hold him within its arms.

The cell is quiet, dark, and damp. The pallet is lit only by starlight through a small window, by Harry’s wilderness of milky skin. He falls between the youth’s spread open thighs. Harry, who receives him joyfully, in silent delight. The legs part for him, the other man’s cock rising up hard and red and wet. It presses into his taut stomach. He bites down on his cheek to keep from crying out. No one can hear. He reaches for the boy’s cock, feels it jump in his hand. Harry, thickveined and angry-red, wanting. The younger man pants, his eyes closed. “Severus, _please_ ,” he pleads, “Touch me.” It’s a familiar and unfamiliar thing, pumping another man’s cock. He is reminded of his own self, the simple differences, the similarities. He knows what he likes so he focuses on dragging the clear precome around the head, flicking up and under, tracing down the long vein of the undershaft. The boy is ragged and harsh, gripping at his shoulders, his throat. He feels absentminded nails dig into his skin, it is not unpleasant.

“I want you inside me,” the boy whispers. “Please, I’ve thought about it so much.” _Good God, fuck, you cannot say these things to me and expect me to live through them._

Sunk to the hilt, they are _straining_ . Push against, push back. They are nothing, _nothing_ but glorious and dirty, with dust and soil in their hair, knocking cobwebs from the corners of the bed. Severus grunts, he is always in his mind but now here, here in this instant he is reduced to only feeling. Just his very common body, skinny and ugly and pale, wrapped in Harry. Harry’s health and life curling up around him, tight and hot. His own fist has always been a poor imitation, he has never known. Here, here he is a middle-aged sinner, jumping the bones of a boy who is heroic, who is beautiful as a forest fire. He fucks with fervor, with ache, and need and all that wrapped into one madcap point of light of claim and possession. _Mine mine mine_ ground out to every snap of his hips (he has never had anything before). Harry is moaning, trying to keep his voice as quiet as possible. The muscles in his neck strain, shear off like cliffs. Levator scapulae. “Fuck me,” Harry whispers, his hips knocking back to Severus’ own. Harry’s hands come up and pull at Severus, at his shoulders, his hips, burying him further, taking him in as deep as he can, never to be found again. He gives over to the ache, to the want of the other man who is sucking prayers into hidden places on his collar bones, it is like lightning on dry wood, an explosion in fire and a burst of light. He makes a quiet sound, stuttering. He wears the skin of a god for a moment, radiant and bright. Harry borrows it after. (He is even more aware of his own dull humanity after, back in the clay of the flesh, sticky and cold as the sweat dries to his skin.)

He touches the boy’s face, the fine dark hair. “Did I imagine it,” Harry whispers, his lips against Severus’s wiry scalp, the black worms of his hair, “Did I imagine those words that you said?”

“What words?” Severus asks. (He already knows.) He runs idle fingers over idle skin.

“Quos amor verus tenuit, tenebit,” Harry whispers. _True love will hold on to those it has loved._ He is betrayed by his own trite sentimentality. (I didn’t mean it, he could say. He doesn’t say.) _Yes, yes, I love you, I love you in such a foul and monstrous way. It grew in me quickly, passing from cell to cell like an infection, metastasizing like a cancer. I would offer you things no creature should ever offer, tear hearts from kings and lay them at your door._

“I know of no such words,” he says, gruff-voiced. Harry grins, he knows the truth. (Severus will never say it first; Severus may never say anything at all.)

“I love you, you know,” Harry says. It rings clear as the bells. Severus grimaces, shuts his eyes tightly (he is afraid they may be damp, he has not cried in twenty-one years), he presses his mouth against the curve of the sharp jaw. _I love you, Harry Potter. Born in Godric’s Hollow, deep in Cornwall, twenty-two years ago to the summer of 1326. It was the year of the invasion, the year of the false queen and her false lover. I was twenty years old. Clare College was founded at Oxford. England was warm. And you, you came into the world in the sign of the lion. Like a prince. And here you are, somehow, with me._

“You’ll have to go soon,”

“I know,” the sundog says, settling deeper into the wool, “I’ll come back.”

(At night, this time, Heracles holds the blanket up for Geryon. Geryon always stinks of cattle, he is always hesitant, he is always a bit nervous. He drinks in the golden demigod who is formed the way men should be. He looks at the perfect hero. Geryon is not perfect, but he can drink in Heracles with his three faces and six eyes, he touches the man with his six hands. His wings beat, unsure, black as iron-gall ink. “ _Come to bed, Geryon,_ ” Heracles says, sleep drenching his voice. Geryon goes, wraps his hands around the man he loves. This is not a story about monsters this time.)

 

* * *

 

 

The greatest cruelty is that we will never know our own legacy. We do not know the measure of our success, the depths of our failure. Only they, the men of the future, bear that privilege. They study our skeletons (bones of our bodies, bones of our cities), take apart our graves, read us like a book. Severus does not know how the story ends. He does not know that the plague, the great Black Death (scourge of all men), will recur in ever-smaller waves throughout the centuries. The deathknell for the microscopic curse will come in 1928 with the discovery of antibiotics. It is a simple course of ciprofloxacin or doxycycline that will murder the beast. _Yersinia pestis,_ gram-negative, nonmotile, hellbeast of a rod-shaped coccobacillus, will be seen finally and named in 1894 by Alexandre Yersin. He will not know that one-third of his countrymen will die in those two years of plague, later called the _Black Death_ in a name torn from a poem. That the unrelenting misery of backbreaking serfdom will fall, built on the graves of the plague dead, as the workforce is vastly reduced and landowners become desperate to attract workers. They will offer pay, compensation, freedom. From here, up will rise the merchant class with their ideas and their idealism. Up then, up and to the light.

There are still so many mysteries in the Universe. (He hadn’t expected to survive.) Severus puts his faith in questions, in science, in skepticism, in knowledge. He will never know that he will be proved right, all this time, hundreds of years after. (He doesn’t know _after_ , none of us do. Perhaps we are reborn throughout the centuries, memory wiped clean each time. Imagine then, if you will, that perhaps he will come back in January 1960, so much time later, in another world and another story, same old hooknose, same black eyes, ever born in a miserable lakedrenched town called Cokeworth.)

“What are you thinking of?” Harry asks. It is always Harry’s voice in his throat, the same cadences, the same sounds. There is nowhere safe in the world for them. It doesn’t matter. He will steal moments in the dormitory until the end of time if he must. Once Severus Snape grips something in his fingers (horrible, pale, greedy, he is so low), he will not let it go. He traces psalms on the boy’s soft skin.

“I am thinking,” he says, tucking his hair back behind one ear, “about a story I once heard.”

“Tell it to me?” Harry asks. ( _Your smile is too much, it should not be allowed._ ) Severus looks upward through the window toward the bruise-colored sky. Monsters, like beds, can be unmade. _Let grace be with us all_ , he thinks. _Ever and ever._ _Amen._ He closes his eyes, breathes in the air (there is hawthorn there, the scent of the river). Above him, somewhere past the clouds, past the sky, there is a bright white beautiful heaven hanging over him. The winds are cooling, winter coming quickly as a promise. The infection will bank then, as it always does. It is already slowing in spread as the evening temperatures drop into frost. He thinks of quiet, he thinks of snow. He has always preferred winter.

“I’m not good with stories,” he murmurs, “but I remember it started with a hero and a monster.”

(Once upon a time, there was a boy. He had three faces and six eyes; he cupped the world within his six hands. He was strong. He loved books and he loved the stars and the sky, his little hound. Once upon a time, he met Heracles, who was young and sunkissed. Let us suppose then that Heracles set down the bow, set aside his fear, and came instead to Geryon, who was wide-eyed and still gentle. “Hello,” Heracles says, taking two of Geryon’s hands in his own. “you have beautiful hands.”)

This is not a story about monsters. Not this time.

 

Art by likelightinglass.

**Author's Note:**

> I have wanted to write something set in history for a very long time. History is my first love. It is the record of humanity - our achievements, our greatest failures. If we are the collection of our scars, then history is the story of how we got those. My particular area of interest has always been medicine and illness from late antiquity to the medieval period, so I leaned into that fascination here. 
> 
> As always, thank you to my inspirations. To Anne Carson (first, always), F. Scott Fitzgerald, Pablo Neruda, and Walt Whitman. Dylan Thomas. To Umberto Eco, to Hilary Mantel. To the Velvet Underground, Patti Smith, Lou Reed, those old poets.


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